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Publisher Copyright: Copyright: © 2022 Volta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) hit Europe in January 2020. By March, Europe was the active centre of the pandemic. As a result, widespread "lockdown" measures were enforced across the various European countries, even if to a different extent. Such actions caused a dramatic reduction, especially in road traffic. This event can be considered the most significant experiment ever conducted in Europe to assess the impact of a massive switch-off of atmospheric pollutant sources. In this study, we focus on in situ concentration data of the main atmospheric pollutants measured in twelve European cities, characterized by different climatology, emission sources, and strengths. We propose a methodology for the fair comparison of the impact of lockdown measures considering the non-stationarity of meteorological conditions and emissions, which are progressively declining due to the adoption of stricter air quality measures. The analysis of these unmatched circumstances allowed us to estimate the impact of a nearly zero-emission urban transport scenario on air quality in 12 European cities. The clearest result, common to all the cities, is that a dramatic traffic reduction effectively reduces NO2 concentrations. In contrast, each city’s PM and ozone concentrations can respond differently to the same type of emission reduction measure. From the policy point of view, these findings suggest that measures targeting urban traffic alone may not be the only effective option for improving air quality in cities. publishersversion published

Non-suppressed ion chromatography (NSIC) has been optimized to permit the determination of chloride, nitrate and sulfate in the low mg/l concentration range within 3 min. Using conductometric detection the extraneous (positive) injection peak was found to adversely affect the early eluting chloride signal when samples with high amounts of total cations are analyzed. The serial arrangement of a downstream potentiometric detector with a chloride ion selective electrode, which does not respond to other alterations of the composition of the eluent than the change in chloride concentrations, is shown to be suitable for interference-free, sensitive and reliable chloride evaluation. Application of the proposed system to the determination of chloride in extracts of filter collected airborne particulates revealed (for those samples that could be evaluated by both detection methods) high precision and no systematic deviations between conductometric and potentiometric detection.