Hawa Dawa launches area-wide immission register on nitrogen dioxide immissions in Germany

How high are nitrogen dioxide immissions in Germany? Are we making progress with the much-invoked transport, energy, and heat turnaround, the urgent reduction of fossil combustion processes and the elimination of climate-damaging emissions? And – if so – which kind of relief for people, nature and the environment will be the result and at what pace, in which regions? These questions are increasingly occupying politicians, administrators, researchers and citizens. Now Hawa Dawa presents a new approach that leverages multiple advantages of new technologies to enable a higher spatial and temporal resolution of air pollution data. The immission register thus has the potential to form the business intelligence basis for a data-based transport turnaround and climate policy.

With its high-resolution data on NO2 concentration, which can be accessed via an interface (API) and integrated into any application, Hawa Dawa offers a unique opportunity to display the state of our air over a wide area. This is made possible by algorithms that intelligently combine information from a wide variety of data sources and use it for a seamless representation. Data from earth observation by satellites are taken into account, and data from stationary public measuring stations and, for the first time, also from digital measuring networks that meet the regulatory data quality requirements. On this basis, the highly granular, area-wide picture is generated.

The foundations for this were also made possible by a grant from the European Space Agency (ESA), which commissioned the implementation of the project for the AI-based generation of dynamic urban air quality models. The algorithm developed and applied by Hawa Dawa for downscaling the coarsely gridded data from earth observation converts satellite data into an appropriate granularity for the high-resolution API.

Unlike other solutions on the market, which are usually based on data on emission sources and the simulated distribution of pollutants, the Hawa Dawa API is based on measured – i.e. actual – pollutant concentrations from different sources. Models and measurements are combined to create a realistic and high-resolution picture of immissions. Among professionals, this process is known as data fusion.

The register is thus also an example of “open data” – the idea of using freely usable public sector data to promote transparency and collaboration for the common good and thus solve societal challenges. It shows what is possible when expertise in environmental information and in data science are combined.

The graphic representation of the Hawa Dawa register as a map shows the high resolution, which has not been available on the market yet.

The new data offering can be obtained directly from Hawa Dawa (sales@hawadawa.com) or integrated into the respective technical environments of our partners HERE (HERE location platform), Esri (ArcGIS ), and Microsoft (Microsoft AppSource). In the coming months, more countries will be added to the registry. For Switzerland, the data is already attainable via Swisscom.