EVALUATION OF PASSIVE METHODS FOR MEASURING OZONE IN THE EUROPEAN ALPS

The on-line monitoring of atmospheric pollutants in air quality networ ks requires expensive and sophisticated measurement techniques, The ap plication of passive samplers that have a smaller temporal resolution is useful for measuring the spatial distribution of atmospheric pollut ants, Moreover, passive samplers have a strong advantage in remote are as where electrical power is not available, In recent years a great va riety of passive sampler types have been used for several pollutants, In 1991 and 1992, the GSF Forschungszentrum fur Umwelt und Gesundheit invited various research groups to make their ozone and nitrogen oxide sampling systems available for comparative testing, It was considered valuable to include not only well established systems but also method s still being developed, For the main comparative test six working gro ups with different methods took part, The main goal was to evaluate th e integrating ozone measuring methods in comparison with on-line ozone monitoring techniques under field conditions. For this reason a large number of collection systems at six alpine measuring stations in Ital y and Bavaria characterizing different location types were compared ov er 22 weeks.