Urban Air Quality: Case Study in the City of Brasília/DF, Capital of Brazil

Ambient air quality is an increasingly prominent environmental factor within the sustainable development of an urban territory, due to a growing awareness on the harmful and transboundary nature of its effects. The main objective of this work was to build knowledge on the quality of ambient air and climate, in the metropolitan area of Brasília/DF, the capital of Brazil. The experimental procedure was designed so as to allow the response to this objective: a) appealed to the temporal series of pollutants measured in the existing regulatory network in this urban area, in the last 10 years; and the data from the National Institute of Meteorology - NIMET; b) correlated statistically all data analyzed. We found a poor spatial coverage of the network for monitoring of ambient air quality in urban area. The only pollutants measured continuously in Brasília/DF are respirable particles (PM₁₀), which is manifestly insufficient, taking into account the different types of sources found. In this way, it is crucial to raise the level of knowledge about the quality of the resource "air" in this city to become more effective and efficient management. The information now obtained constitutes the basis for developing an urban strategy to increase the resilience of populations potentially affected by this problem, i.e., aims to guide the process of ambient air quality management of this Brazilian city to enable you to hold (when good) or, in other cases are initiated investigations/actions that improve.