Air quality monitoring across Europe using IoT/low-cost sensors within the AD4GD project

Despite longstanding awareness of its risks, air pollution remains one of the biggest challenges for humanity with profound health impacts affecting the lives of billions globally. However, while effective monitoring of air pollution is critically important, it is still inadequate: on one hand ground-based measurement networks of air pollutants often lack sufficient spatial coverage, partly due to the high costs and maintenance requirements involved; on the other hand the process complexity in air chemistry complicates modelling of regional air quality on high-resolution. This is a pressing issue particularly in urban areas where pollutant levels can vary drastically.

In this context, measurements from Internet of Things (IoT)/low-cost sensors, for instance from citizen science projects, offer a valuable opportunity to overcome these challenges and can provide deeper insights into local-scale air pollution.

In a pilot study of the Horizon Europe project "All Data 4 Green Deal" (AD4GD), the objective is to explore how existing IoT data from various sources can be effectively utilized and how they might contribute to air quality monitoring, particularly regarding health impacts.

Here, we present the first preliminary results of this pilot study, highlighting the effectiveness of IoT sensors in selected cities across Europe. We also compare our results with various reference datasets from in situ and analysis models, demonstrating that IoT sensors can significantly improve coverage in these specific urban areas. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges associated with these sensors and potential strategies for addressing them.