Air quality — Meteorology — Siting classifications for surface observing stations on land

ISO 19289:2015 indicates exposure rules for various sensors, but what should be done when these conditions are not fulfilled? There are sites that do not respect the recommended exposure rules. Consequently, a classification has been established to help determine the given site's representativeness on a small scale (impact of the surrounding environment).

The classification process helps the actors and managers of a network to better take into consideration the exposure rules and thus it often improves the siting. At least, the siting environment is known and documented in the metadata. It is obviously possible and recommended to fully document the site but the risk is that a fully documented site might increase the complexity of the metadata, which would often restrict their operational use. That is why this siting classification is defined to condense the information and facilitate the operational use of this metadata information.

A site as a whole has no single classification number. Each parameter being measured at a site has its own class and is sometimes different from the others. If a global classification of a site is required, the maximum value of the parameters' classe