NPL's Network Role

Networks of ambient measurement sites are supported by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Devolved Administrations, Local Authorities and other organisations. They exist to provide public health information, to monitor compliance with UK and EU regulation, and to further air quality modelling and research aims.

There are three aspects to NPL's role in these networks:

• Certification of accurate calibration standards supplied to monitoring sites, and calibration of ozone analysers so that they are traceable to NPL's UK national ozone standard
  
  
• Field instrument checks and calibrations, including for around 100 sites in the London Air Quality Network
  
  
• Full management of networks, including quality assurance of network data. NPL currently manages four networks for Defra:
  
  
  • Heavy Metals Network
  • Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) Network
  • Particle Counting and Speciation Network
  • Black Carbon Network
    
    
  Reports are now available on the Defra website, UK-AIR

The first two of these are UKAS accredited calibration services (No 0478), and provide a final dataset of the highest possible quality, fulfilling the requirements of the end-users of the data.

Contact

Customer Service tel: +44 20 8943 8637
E-mail: environmental_enquiries@npl.co.uk