European air quality maps for 2020. PM10, PM2.5, Ozone, NO2, NOx and Benzo(a)pyrene spatial estimates and their uncertainties.

The report provides the annual update of the European air quality concentration maps and population exposure estimates for human health related indicators of pollutants PM10 (annual average, 90.4 percentile of daily means), PM2.5 (annual average), ozone (93.2 percentile of maximum daily 8-hour means, SOMO35, SOMO10), NO2 (annual average) and benzo(a)pyrene (annual average), and vegetation related ozone indicators (AOT40 for vegetation and for forests) for the year 2020. The report contains also Phytotoxic ozone dose (POD) for wheat, potato and tomato maps and NOx annual average map for 2020. The benzo(a)pyrene map is presented for the first time in this regular mapping report. The trends in exposure estimates in the period 2005–2020 are summarized. The analysis for 2020 is based on the interpolation of the annual statistics of the 2020 observational data reported by the EEA member and cooperating countries and other voluntary reporting countries and stored in the Air Quality e-reporting database, complemented, when needed, with measurements from additional sources. The mapping method is the Regression – Interpolation – Merging Mapping (RIMM). It combines monitoring data, chemical transport model results and other supplementary data using linear regression model followed by kriging of its residuals (residual kriging). The paper presents the mapping results and gives an uncertainty analysis of the interpolated maps. It also presents concentration change in 2020 in comparison to the five-year average 2015-2019 using the difference maps.