Air Quality Monitoring

East Staffordshire Borough Council currently undertakes monitoring of the following pollutants;-

• Nitrogen dioxide (NO2)
• Particulates (PM10)

NO2 is monitored in two ways, automatically via a chemiluminescent analyser located at our automatic monitoring station on St Peters Bridge, Burton upon Trent and an extended diffusion tube network dating back to 2000. Further tubes have been added in recent times, with over 50 tubes at present.

The chemiluminescent analyser is an accurate method of monitoring pollutants, whilst diffusion tubes offer greater spatial resolution because they are cheaper and simple to use and can be used to identify hot spots of pollution.

PM10 is currently monitored by TEOM (Tapered Elemental Oscillating Microbalance), which is also located at our automatic monitoring station.

A Quality Assurance & Quality Control (QA/QC) programme is important in ensuring credible and reliable air quality data is obtained. Currently East Staffordshire Borough Council contracts out the management of its air quality data for QA/QC purposes.

Please check the links at the left hand side of the page for further information, or click here to return to the Pollution homepage.