Monitoring Air Quality with EO in Sarajevo
With the support of ESA’s GDA cross-cutting activity Fast EO co-Financing Facility (FFF) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Sarajevo is using EO data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and Sentinel-5P satellites to better monitor the city’s air quality.
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Description
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina is regularly ranked as one of the world’s most polluted cities due to its mountainous geography which traps in pollutants, and because of its widespread use of coal and wood for heating and electricity. In January 2025, Sarajevo saw its air quality index (AQI) hit 320, well above the hazardous threshold of 300. As the city seeks to improve its infrastructure, it needs to ensure new projects do not exacerbate the problem. Because its air quality analysis is limited to the use of traditional ground-based monitoring, Earth Observation is being used with the support of ESA’s GDA cross-cutting activity Fast EO co-Financing Facility (FFF) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), to improve the monitoring and assessment of the city’s air quality.
EO data from Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and Sentinel-5P satellites were used to enhance air quality monitoring. Machine learning techniques improve the resolution of the data and help distinguish human-caused pollution from weather-related effects. The results are delivered through an interactive online dashboard that provides both real-time and historical air quality information. By improving the spatial accuracy of air quality data and the reliability of before-and-after comparisons, this EO-based approach enables city planners to better assess the environmental impacts of infrastructure improvements.
You can find out more about this Case Study on the GDA Impact Sphere: EO helps Sarajevo see through the smog