Ozone Monitoring In Austria

Abstract

The paper will describe first, in a more general way the tasks of air pollution monitoring systems developed and implemented by the Austrian Research Center Seibersdorf in the last three years. This part will include a general technical overview of concepts of the air pollution monitoring system UWEDAT® The second part of the paper will introduce the Austrian Ozone Monitoring System installed in 1993, which monitors traditional pollutants such as sulfur dioxide as well as secondary pollutants, such as ozone and nitrogen dioxide etc..., depending on the configuration of the local measurement systems in the federal countries of Austria. One capture of this part will present in detail new technical aspects in handling such highly distributed computer networks as well as demonstrate the Ozone Monitoring System as an already working meta information system for environmental data. Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 4, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541 302 Pollution Control and Monitoring 1. Overview and general tasks of monitoring systems Environmental monitoring systems provide the automatic measurement of environmental media. In general, these systems measure a set of environmental parameters at a number of distinct points, spread all over the area to be observed. Informations about the environmental state have become very important within the last few years. In the process of gaining environmental information, monitoring systems have an important task to fulfill in gathering data of the current state and making the data available for long range observation. The process of gaining environmental data depends on the data itself. Only for a small (but however important part) of environmental informations measurement can be made continuously. In this case we talk about monitoring. Due to new environmental laws, the monitoring of air quality has widely been achieved in Germany and Austria within the last few years [1]. The tasks of air pollution monitoring systems can be divided into three main categories: • routine tasks • support for alarm situations and • long range observation of air pollution. The information processing in a monitoring system [2] may be outlined as below: • data aggregation and filtering • real-time distributed systems, • quality control, • database management, • visualization and user interface techniques, • automatic report generation. In particular, we will demonstrate a system built by the Austrian Research Center Seibersdorf which is operated in the provinces Carinthia, Upper Austria, Vienna (Federal Environmental Agency Austria) and in Voitsberg (Styria) and Zeltweg (Styria) as local air pollution monitoring system in the surroundings of power steam plants.. With these tasks there are many software methods involved in order to support users and to assure high quality data. For an overview, see [1,2]. Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 4, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541