Background concentrations in Norway - Towards automated annual updates

Abstract

A semi-automated technique was developed for performing annual updates of the dataset on background concentrations in Norway which was produced in previous years. The code is written in the Matlab programming language and large parts of the code base are included in the Appendix of this report. The spatial component of the system was updated to include data from 2009 through 2011. Acquiring and preparing the input data for the spatial component still requires a relatively small amount of manual effort, however the majority of the remaining process has been automated to the largest extent possible, such that only the derivation of the semivariograms for the residual kriging step requires very brief interaction by an expert user. The temporal component has been updated to version 8 of the European air quality database (AirBase), now including several additional years up to and including 2013. Entirely new anomaly matrices have been calculated from the updated data for all background stations in Norway. Assuming that the availability and the format of the required input data remains unchanged, future annual updates of the system can be carried out within a very short time frame on the order of around 1-2 days.