Dear Colleagues,

Air quality has deteriorated around the world since the onset of industrialization, especially over the last few decades, in line with a steep rise in global population and the prolific use of fossil fuel burning processes. As a result, we are now at a point where air pollution is arguably the single biggest threat we face as a global society today. Indeed, it has been estimated that 91% of the world’s population live in areas where levels of air pollutants exceed safe limits, and that resultant exposure is leading to 8 million deaths each year. Owing to a high population density with numerous large cities and several key areas of industrial activity, Europe is now considered a global air pollution hotspot. It has been estimated that exposure to air pollutants in Europe results in nearly half a million deaths across the region annually and that on average, breathing polluted air reduces the average European citizen’s life expectancy by roughly one year. The financial implications are equally staggering, with studies indicating that costs of air pollution related deaths and diseases are of the order of USD 1.6 trillion, roughly one tenth of the region’s gross domestic product. On the back of a rapidly evolving atmosphere post-COVID-19, it is more crucial than ever that we focus our attention on measuring and characterizing the composition of Europe’s airscape. In such a complex, dynamic region, many questions remain to be answered, for which we need detailed observations that will allow us to determine the concentrations, sources, transportation mechanisms, and chemical transformation pathways of atmospheric components that can affect our air quality and impose an array of long-lasting impacts. In this Special Issue, we bring together work from a range of monitoring studies investigating air pollution in Europe in an effort to investigate issues ranging from chemical composition and evolution or gases and particles, to impacts of pollutants on health and the environment.

Dr. Kevin P. Wyche
Guest Editor

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• air pollution
• air quality
• Europe
• monitoring
• nitrogen dioxide
• Ozone
• particulate matter
• dust
• secondary aerosol
• ammonia