Ever wonder why some days you feel a heavy, hurting head, a general low energy and quite a bad mood with no reason?
Well, if you could see it with your own eyes, you would see that very likely NO2, Ozone and other nasty pollution gases are over the top all around you.
Today’s pic of Athens (above) shows it very well. That’s why you have headache. You probably blame the high humidity or the heat.
But it’s not the humidity, nor the heat. It’s the bad air quality.
These days NO2 levels in Athens are up to 120 μg/m3, which is almost 5 times the accepted level of 25 μg/m3 for a day (WHO guidelines).
NO2 accepted levels are actually 10 μg/m3 as annual mean, but Athens levels are well above that, and because of this Greece has been taken to the EU court repeatedly for not taking measures to correct the problem. But instead, the governments have simply decided to pay environmental fines, which is way easier (but so irresponsible!) than making the necessary changes.
It’s noteworthy to mention that the pollution in Athens these days is not so much coming from particulate matter PM2,5, which is relatively low (just a bit above the annual mean for the city of around 15 μg/m3), but mostly from gases: NO2, NO, Ozone and others.
The brown color of the haze in the pic above is mainly due to NO2.
CleanAir in Greece 