About maqua.app

What this is

A public-service view of Malta and Gozo air quality, built on the official monitoring network and published openly.

Malta and Gozo have five automatic air-quality monitoring stations. Their measurements are public, but they are published as an index across the whole of Europe, in a form built for continental comparison rather than for someone in Msida deciding whether to run this evening. maqua.app takes the same measurements and presents them for the islands: which station, which hour, which pollutant, how old the reading is, and what the band conventionally means for health.

It is free, carries no advertising, and sells nothing. There is no account to create, and the map works without giving anything away about yourself.

Who runs it

An independent project. It is not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by ERA or the EEA.

This is not an official ERA or EEA service. For official statements, consult ERA directly.

Nothing on this site should be read as an ERA or EEA statement. Where an official position matters — a compliance question, an incident, a formal complaint — ERA is the authority to approach, and its own publications take precedence over anything here.

Where the data comes from

ERA operates the five monitoring stations. Malta reports the measurements to the European Environment Agency, which republishes them hourly. We read that published feed.

The five stations, all operated by ERA:

Attard, Malta

Sited away from single sources to represent general exposure in the area. 86 m above sea level. Station code MT00008.

Għarb, Gozo

Sited away from single sources to represent general exposure in the area. 114 m above sea level. Station code MT00007.

Msida, Malta

Sited beside a busy road, so it records the higher end of local exposure. 2 m above sea level. Station code MT00011.

St Paul's Bay, Malta

Sited beside a busy road, so it records the higher end of local exposure. 7 m above sea level. Station code MT00009.

Żejtun, Malta

Sited away from single sources to represent general exposure in the area. 56 m above sea level. Station code MT00004.

The Methodology page sets out exactly how a concentration becomes a band, how forecasts are separated from observations, and where the calculation was verified against real published data.

How this site behaves

A few rules are load-bearing. They are the reason some readings look less confident here than elsewhere.

• A missing value is never rendered as zero. Zero is a measurement claim; an absent reading is the absence of one.
• Stale data is never described as live. Every reading shows when it was measured, when it was retrieved, and how old that makes it.
• A forecast is never presented as an observation. Estimates are labelled as estimates.
• Colour never carries meaning on its own. Every band is shown with a colour, a texture, an icon and a written label.
• A single hourly reading is never described as proof that an annual or daily legal limit has been breached.
• AI explains; it never calculates. No index, threshold or timestamp on this site is produced by a language model.

Known limitations

Readings are provisional, one station can stand for a wide area, and coverage gaps happen. Where we are uncertain, we say so instead of filling the gap.

• Coverage. Five stations cannot describe every locality. Għarb is the only station on Gozo. Wherever you are, the nearest station may be several kilometres and several road types away.
• Provisional figures. Near-real-time readings are provisional. ERA validates data after publication, and figures may be revised.
• Gaps. Instruments go offline for maintenance and calibration. Some hours have no usable value, and some pollutants are not measured at every station.
• One index among several. The European Air Quality Index is a communication scale. Other services use different scales and averaging periods, so a different number elsewhere is usually a different question being answered, not an error.

Open by construction

The calculation, the thresholds and the wording of every health message are in the source code, and the same data this site renders is available from its own API. If you think a band is wrong, the arithmetic is there to check.

• Source code (Opens in a new window)
• /api/air-quality — current readings for every station, with the same metadata the pages use.

Contact

Corrections are welcome, particularly about station siting, Maltese place names and orthography, or anything on this site that overstates what the data can support. The fastest route is an issue on the source repository.

Air-quality data provided by Malta's Environment and Resources Authority (ERA), disseminated via the European Environment Agency (EEA). maqua.app is an independent project and is not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by ERA or the EEA.

maqua.app provides general environmental information and does not replace medical advice or official emergency guidance.