A Comparative Study on the Ambient Air Quality Standard Strength among Korea, the U.S.A. and the EU

Based on air quality monitoring data ('10 similar to'14) of Suwon City provided by the Korean Department of Environment, a fundamental statistic for 5 criteria pollutants such as SO2, CO, NO2, O-3, and PM10 was initially investigated. The purpose of this paper was to review the ambient air quality standards (AAQS) of Korea, the U.S.A. and the EU and further to assess the degree of standard strength by the achievability of the AAQS comparing each national standard. Since the level and the way of standards for each air pollutant are various among countries, it is difficult to determine the degree of relative attainment using the same set of data above. Further when all the areas having bad air quality for a specific pollutant are classified as non-attainment case, it is more difficult to assess the degree of standard strength. Thus we introduced a new concept called the average concentration distance (ACD) to quantitatively estimate the strength. As results, the Korean 1-hr NO2 AAQS is slightly stronger than the US standard and weaker than the EU standard. The Korean O-3 standard is strongest; however, the Korean PM10 standard is weakest. Furthermore the equivalent levels of 8-hr O-3 standards in the U.S.A. and the EU were respectively estimated as 97.5 and 95.7 percentiles of the Korean standard with maintaining the existing standard of 60 ppb.