Air Pollution Monitoring in the Industrial Centers of Belarus

Abstract

A monitoring network to estimate air pollution has been set up in 14 industrial areas where 65% of the urban population of the Republic lives. Air pollution is monitored at 47 permanent-operating stations which are fully equipped with devices and apparatuses to produce a running record of the carbon oxide content, to collect air samples for other pollutants and to determine meteorological parameters. Ten of these station are in Minsk and in the other cities there are from two to four. The monitoring program entails taking from three to four daily air samples to estimate the main (dust, sulfur dioxide, carbon oxide, nitrogen dioxide) and specific compounds. The list of specific compounds is based on total emissions of each substance, hazard class and quality standards, dispersion coefficients etc. About 250,000 urban air samples are taken and analyzed annually in Belarus. In some Belarus cities the programme carried out by the stationary-operating stations is backed up by survey and “beneath-the-stack” observations performed by mobile laboratories. Air pollution in large industrial centres is actively monitored by the Ministry of Public Health.