openair (version 2.1-0)

importAirbase: Import hourly data from the European Environment Agency airbase database

Description

Import European Environment Agency airbase hourly air quality data

Usage

importAirbase(site = "gb0620a", year = 1969:2012, pollutant = NA,
  add = c("country", "site.type"), splice = FALSE, local = NA)

Arguments

site

Site code(s) of the sites to be imported. Can be upper or lower case.

year

The year or years of interest. For example to select 2010 to 2012 use year = 2010:2012.

pollutant

The pollutant(s) to be selected. See the list in airbaseStats.

add

Additional fields to add to the returned data frame. By default the country and site type are returned. Other useful options include “city”, “site” (site name), “EMEP_station”, “lat”, “lon” and “altitude”.

splice

Should the pollutant fields be consolidated when multiple measurements of individual pollutants are available? See airbaseSplice for details.

local

Used for tesing local imports.

Value

Returns an hourly data frame with POSIXct date, EEA site code and each individual species.

Details

The European Environment Agency (EEA) makes available hourly air pollution data from across Europe (see http://acm.eionet.europa.eu/databases/airbase/). The EEA go to great lengths to compile, check and make available a huge amount of air quality data. The EEA provide a range of interactive maps and make all data available as csv files. These csv files are split by country and can be very large. The aim of the importAirbase function is to provide an alternative and hopefully complementary approach to accessing airbase data with a specific focus on integration with R and the openair package. Similar to other import functions in openair (see links), the importAirbase function works with sites and combines all species into one data frame. Rather than having year-specific files there is only one file (data frame) per site covering all years. There are many potential issues that need to be dealt with, although for the most part everything should be compiled in a straightforward way. One of the key issues is the use of different instrument techniques measuring the same species at a site, or an instrument that was replaced at some point. The EEA usefully record this information. Rather than attempt to combine several potential time series for the same pollutant, they have been kept separate. Examples include these use of different methods to measure PM10 e.g. TEOM and FDMS. Because different instruments can provide very different concentrations it is probably wise to keep them separate and analyse them as separate species. In other cases e.g. ozone or NO2, if an instrument was replaced half way through a time series it would be reasonable to combine the time series into a single set. There is a function airbaseSplice that will combine pollutants once imported using importAirbase. NOTE! This function should be considered as provisional and the author would appreciate any feedback on its use.

See Also

airbaseSplice, airbaseFindCode, airbaseStats, airbaseInfo