EEA air quality — introduction#
The European Environment Agency (EEA)
operates the official European air-quality reporting system: member
states submit reference-grade monitor observations under the Air
Quality Directive, which the EEA publishes through its download service.
This backend wraps the airbase
client over that service.
This page orients the earthlens EEA backend (eea_aq). For the
hands-on download walkthrough see Usage; for the install /
access notes see Authentication; the rendered API
is the Reference page.
What earthlens returns#
The backend returns a long-format pandas.DataFrame — one row per
measurement:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
station_id |
EEA Samplingpoint id ("DE/SPO-...") |
country |
ISO2 country parsed from the sampling-point prefix |
parameter |
pollutant name (pm25, no2, …) |
datetime_utc |
measurement period start (tz-aware UTC) |
value |
measured concentration |
units |
reporting units (ug.m-3, mg.m-3) |
agg_type |
EEA aggregation type (hour) |
validity / verification |
EEA data-quality flags |
dataset |
the reporting era (Historical / Verified / Unverified) |
provider |
"EEA" |
This makes EEA a tabular backend
(EEA_AQ.OUTPUT_KIND == "tabular"), like earthlens.openaq. The facade
rejects an aggregate= argument for it.
Country granularity (no lat / lon)#
The EEA service is queried per country (ISO2), not per bbox, and the
delivered Parquet carries no coordinates — they live only in a
separate 100+ MB metadata export whose keys do not cleanly join. So this
backend maps the request bbox to the reporting countries whose own
bounding box intersects it (or an explicit country=) and returns
every station in those countries. Results are country-granular and
have no lat / lon columns; pass country= to be precise. See
Usage.
Reporting eras (datasets)#
The EEA splits its archive into three named datasets by reporting era. The backend picks the one(s) spanning the requested years automatically:
| Dataset | Years | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
Historical |
2002–2012 | pre-Directive archive |
Verified |
2013–2022 | quality-assured (E1a) |
Unverified |
2023+ | up-to-date, not yet verified (E2a/UTD) |
Why it matters here#
Where earthlens.airnow is the North-American reference network and
earthlens.openaq is the global aggregator, EEA is the authoritative
European reference network — the regulatory monitors behind EU
air-quality assessments.