AirQuality26 glossary
Definitions that improve access without removing technical meaning or uncertainty.
Terms used in AQ26 reports
- AURN
- The Automatic Urban and Rural Network, the principal UK network of official automatic air-quality stations.
- Station-day
- One station providing one valid daily value for one pollutant; it is not a person's exposure.
- Provisional data
- Official monitoring information that may change during quality assurance and ratification.
- Completeness
- The proportion of expected station-days or measurements that were available and valid.
- Screening flag
- A preliminary observation for follow-up, not proof of an exceedance, cause, breach or health effect.
- Multiplicity adjustment
- Methods that reduce false discoveries when many statistical comparisons are considered.
- Validated join
- A record match that passed linkage checks; it does not prove source contribution or causation.
- WHO contextual reference
- A health-based guideline used for context, not automatically a UK legal compliance limit.
- Source attribution
- A conclusion about which source contributed to pollution; proximity alone cannot establish it.