About the website

This website provides the public with easy access to information about ozone pollution across Europe. It was developed by EEA in cooperation with other European organisations.

The website provides map views and graphs of ground-level ozone conditions. The information is based on near real-time data provided by national and regional organisations.

As a joint European project, the website reflects the transboundary character of air pollution. Air pollutants may be transported over distances of 500 km a day.

The project involved voluntary contributions from people who supported the work. The EEA would like to thank those who donated their time and effort for focus groups, testing and supporting the data acquisition. Click here to see a list of names. The project also received funding from Norway to support the scientific basis and presentation of data.

The EEA plans to extend the website. Likely developments are to increase the sophistication of the calculations behind the map colouring and include other important air pollutants such as particulate matter.

The system behind the website consists of several modules and makes use of various GIS and database technologies. The data collection and verification system is provided by Microsoft BizTalk; the central database for storing and processing hourly ozone data is ESRI ArcSDE and Microsoft SQL Server. The interpolation engine for creating hourly ozone surfaces is a .NET framework within ESRI ArcGIS. Image map services for displaying ozone data along with base data layers are provided through ESRI ArcIMS. The website itself is based on Macromedia Flash, ArcIMS and Plone. Some components will be released by EEA under open-source licences.