Forschungszentrum Jülich’s NOx Plotter
Traffic emissions of nitrogen oxides are the main reason for high NO2 concentrations in German cities. JSC and IEK-8 have released a new web tool to evaluate NO2 levels at German air quality monitoring sites and estimate the required traffic reduction to meet air quality targets in cases where the legal limits are exceeded. The tool at https://nox-plotter.fz-juelich.de asks for a place or street name and presents the user with a list of air quality monitoring stations within a selected search radius. After a station has been selected, a series of plots can be generated showing the development of annual mean NO2 concentrations at this station over the past 10 years, the necessary reduction in the NO2 concentration, and the estimated emission reduction. The tool has been accessed by several thousand users a day. Shortly after its release, it had to be modified to enable it to cope with such a high number of requests. The data for this tool originate from the German Environment Agency (UBA) and are stored several times a day in the Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR) database, which is hosted at JSC. The Earth System Data Exploration team is working on the further development of this database and is looking into further applications for scientific and general use. Deep learning techniques are being applied to the TOAR data within the ERC project IntelliAQ.
Contact: Dr. Martin Schultz, m.schultz@fz-juelich.de
from JSC News No. 264, 27 March 2019