The Cyprus Atmospheric Observatory: A unique outpost to monitor the increase of Middle East Air Pollution

Cyprus is located at the south easternmost of the Mediterranean basin, a highly populated region (400 million inhabitants) threatened by exceptionally rapid urbanization and industrialization, intense dust storms, and heat extremes leading to drastic degradation of air quality, expected to exacerbate in the coming decades. Air pollution, especially particulate matter (PM), plays a crucial role in regional climate and has major adverse health effects and major economic consequences. The Cyprus Atmospheric Observatory (CAO) is a regional background station of the pan-European ACTRIS Research Infrastructure Network. It was established in 2015 with a view to fill-in the current observational gaps in this region through high quality, long term monitoring of atmospheric pollutants of climate and health relevance.

In close collaboration with the Department of Labour Inspection and in the framework of the Horizon 2020 EMME-CARE research project, CAO has built a unique and detailed PM chemical composition database for the past decade which was further processed to investigate the long-term trends using the mann-kendall non-parametric statistical test while the identification of the geographic location of the major pollution sources affecting the island was achieved through the Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART.

Based on the statistical Mann-Kendall trend analysis, an increasing trend in PM₁₀ levels was observed at the regional background (CAO) station (+0.23 µg.m^-3.y^-1). It is interesting to note that the concentrations of most PM species are rising, especially mineral dust with an average increasing rate of +0.26 µg.m^-3.y^-1 followed by OM (+0.1 µg.m^-3.y^-1). The source regions analysis indicates that the Middle east sector is associated not only with the most elevated concentrations for the main PM₁₀ components, both of natural (mineral dust) and anthropogenic origin (carbonaceous species, nitrate and nss-K⁺), but also with increasing trends for most of them. Especially for sulfate, it is worth mentioning that while rather stable levels were recorded for different source regions, the Middle East sector exhibited increasing trend (+0.2 µg.m^-3.y^-1) indicating increasing fossil fuel (oil and gas) emissions.

 

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 EMME-CARE project (grant agreement N^o 856612).