RESEARCH ARTICLE
The EU-25 Emissions from Road Transport and Ground Level Ozone Air Pollution at Rural Mountain Sites in Slovakia
S. Bičárová*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 88
Last Page: 93
Publisher ID: TOTJ-2-88
DOI: 10.2174/1874447800802010088
Article History:
Received Date: 31/3/2008Revision Received Date: 6/8/2008
Acceptance Date: 25/9/2008
Electronic publication date: 28/11/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Road transport sector produces a significant quantity of ground level ozone (O3) precursors. Relevant abatement of exhaust emissions has been achieved in Europe during last decades due to environmental policy. Presented results indicate relatively weak response of key O3 precursors decrease: NOx (-40%), NMVOC (-69%), and CO (-63%) from the EU-25 road transport to O3 concentration at background site Stará Lesná in Slovakia for time period 1992-2005. At this site mean annual O3 concentration varies around 63.4 μg m-3 and detected slight decrease of -0.89 μg m-3/decade is not statistically significant. Furthermore, high O3 concentrations occurred in the High Tatra Mts region during the August 2003 heat wave which showed an important impact of long-range air pollution on air quality of Slovak mountain region. More studies will be needed to specify the role of meteorological and environmental factors in the transport and transformation of emissions from large urban regions to remote sites.