How is air quality monitored in Toulouse?
The Atmo Occitanie agency is in charge of monitoring air quality in the Toulouse conurbation. For this, it relies on 11 permanent stations, six temporary stations, 180 additional measurement points.
It is common to see in the Journal Toulousain and elsewhere, articles concerning air quality in Toulouse and Occitanie. These are based on bulletins issued by the agency Atmo Occitania, a state-approved association. It is she who is responsible for monitoring air quality in the Toulouse conurbation and in the region as a whole.
With a history of thirty years of monitoring in the context of regulatory monitoring and local partnerships, Atmo Occitanie provides extensive information on the urban area of Toulouse. But above all, it diffuses” a daily air quality indicator calculated from the concentrations in the air of regulated pollutants”, as explained the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
A whole system to control air quality in Toulouse
To assess air quality, Atmo Occitanie claims to rely on a global device :
‐ measurements of pollutants in the ambient air;
‐ the inventory of emissions: spatialized knowledge of the emissions produced by the activities;
‐ modelling: coupled with meteorological data, it makes it possible to produce maps of exposure to air pollution.
“In 2022, 11 permanent stations, six temporary stations, 180 additional measurement points have been granted to surveillance on the territory through various partnerships”, indicates the agency. “Atmo Occitanie is carrying out a comparable program for the next few years, supplemented by assessment campaigns in the municipalities around Toulouse. »
Micro-sensors, hyper-spectral cameras,…
Other innovative devices make it possible to control the quality of the airlike micro-sensors and hyper-spectral cameras.
“The City of Paris and Bloomberg Philanthropies, in partnership with Airparif, have led a pilot project on outdoor air pollution and experimented with new measurement tools from September 2019 to September 2020, in particular evaluating the contribution of micro-sensors to the monitoring system”, as Atmo Occitanie recounts.
In particular, this project concluded that “ micro-sensors remain good teaching tools which should be used to help raise awareness about air quality”. But it is “not recommended to use a network of micro-sensors alone to ensure surveillance and public information”. As well, the latter “did not provide more information than the reference device”.
“Micro-sensors and other original technologies currently have insufficient reliability and precision and cannot replace the reference device,” says Atomo Occitanie.