Description

These data are from monitoring sites which have the objective of capturing near by shale gas/hydraulic fracturing/fracking operations and are a part of the Environmental Baseline Project. Data from these sites are planned to be used before, during, and after shale gas operations take place. WACL is responsible for the management of air quality data and CH₄ and CO₂ data are provided by the University of Manchester.

These data are not validated or ratified and should be considered preliminary and therefore not be used for anything “serious”. Dates are reported in UTC time.

Data access

These data undergo quality assurance and control procedures at the University of York or Manchester and then are made available on the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) portal and can be found by searching with the “Environmental Baseline Project” keywords. They are publicly available data, but there is a registration process. This live data feed includes data from calibration and maintenance periods, these are flagged appropriately in the corrected data available on CEDA.

What is an atmospheric baseline?

An atmospheric baseline is a set of measurements at a given location that are statistically representative of current atmospheric conditions, and that reflect the current effects of existing local, regional and global pollution sources. An atmospheric baseline provides a value against which the incremental impacts of new emissions, new sources or policy interventions can be assessed. The baseline in air pollution conditions vary by wind direction, time of day and by season and are established through long-term continuous observations.