Air Quality in Seoul’s metropolitan area improves thanks to sustainable policies
The Seoul (Korea) metropolitan area, visible in this image acquired by one of the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites on 3 December 2023, is home to 26 million people.
A recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on air quality in the metropolis has revealed that, in 2005, the levels of harmful air pollutants, such as particulate matter (PM), were much higher than national standards and World Health Organization (WHO) thresholds. However, thanks to the Korean government's efforts to establish a strong regulatory framework to manage air quality in the region, the concentration of these pollutants reduced significantly by 2020.
The TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) onboard the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite allows scientists to monitor the levels of the majority of air pollutants with an unprecedented level of detail on a global scale, with a revisit time of one day.
