Among different methodological approaches under development
(Righini et al., 2013), in this work we present an original tool
contributing to the best siting of monitoring networks and the
qualitative assessment of their spatial representativeness by means
of geo-referenced data of pollutant emissions and spatial analysis of
emissions variability. We consider the emission variability around a
site as the spatial variation of emissions around it and we calculate
it using a neighbourhood statistical function in GIS. Input data of
pollutant emissions covering the whole Italian territory were
derived from the national emission inventory (ISPRA, 2009) in its
model input version for feeding the Italian atmospheric modelling
system (www.minni.org; Mircea et al., 2014)