Proficiency testing scheme field measurements of PM10/PM2.5 13/01-23/02/2022, Ispra - Italy
European Commission harmonisation programme for air quality measurements
The Joint Research Centre of the European Union (JRC) has been organizing Proficiency Testing (PT) exercises for air pollutants regulated by European Directive 2008/50/EC and following amendments for more than a decade. Participation is mandatory for the EU Member States National Reference Laboratories (NRL) in order to demonstrate measurement’s comparability between them.
A PT for the determination of Particulate Matter (PM) mass concentration with the EN reference gravimetric method was organised by the European Reference Laboratory for Air Pollution (ERLAP).
The scope of this test was to assess the performance of the participants’ procedures and to evaluate the method's reproducibility. In the period January-February 2022, ERLAP and 20 NRL deployed 22 samplers for PM10 and 20 samplers for PM2.5 in the JRC Ispra site (Italy) to collect ambient aerosol. The assigned values for PM10 and PM2.5 were calculated as the robust average of all participants’ daily means.
Between the reported values, 4 out of 812 (0.5%) for PM10, and, 7 out of 797 (0.9%) for PM2.5, were found unsatisfactory against the z’-score criteria.
The overall results of this PT show a similar performance to the previous one, which suggests that the measurement procedures have already reached a high level of quality. The reproducibility of the method for PM10 and PM2.5 was calculated as a function of the concentration level. At 50µg/m3 for PM10 and 30µg/m3 for PM2.5, the method reproducibility values were found to be 5% and 6.1%, respectively
TARRICONE Claudia;
BARBIERE Maurizio;
LAGLER Friedrich;
PUTAUD Jean-Philippe;
BOROWIAK Annette;
2023-01-20
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC131737
978-92-76-61753-2 (online),
1831-9424 (online),
EUR 31388 EN,
OP KJ-NA-31-388-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC131737,
10.2760/13358 (online),
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