Terms

What this site is

maqua.app is a free, independent, public-information site. It presents air-quality measurements from the five automatic monitoring stations in Malta and Gozo, together with the European Air Quality Index band for each pollutant and the health wording conventionally attached to that band. There is no account, nothing to buy, and no service being sold to you.

It is supported by advertising. What that means for your data is set out on the Privacy page. Advertising has no bearing on the readings, the bands or the guidance.

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

Whose data this is

The measurements are not this site's to license. They are produced by Malta's Environment and Resources Authority and disseminated through the European Environment Agency, and they reach you here under the upstream re-use policies described below.

Air-quality measurements — ERA, via the EEA

Reported by Malta under Directive 2008/50/EC and Directive 2004/107/EC. EEA content is published under the agency's standard re-use policy (Opens in a new window) — re-use is permitted with acknowledgement of the source, unless otherwise stated.

Weather and dust context — Open-Meteo

Meteorological context and the CAMS-derived dust fields come from Open-Meteo under CC BY 4.0 (Opens in a new window), which requires attribution to Open-Meteo (Opens in a new window) wherever the data appears. The underlying model output comes from national weather services and the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service under their own open terms.

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.

Reusing what you find here

You are welcome to. The readings are a public record, and this site exists to make them easier to read rather than to sit between you and them.

• Carry the attribution forward. If you republish the measurements, acknowledge ERA and the EEA as above. If you republish the weather or dust context, acknowledge Open-Meteo. That obligation comes from the upstream licences, not from this site.
• Use the API rather than scraping. /api/air-quality returns the same readings the pages render, with the same provenance metadata — measured-at, retrieved-at, and whether a value is measured or modelled. It is public and documented. Please be considerate with it: it is a small project in front of someone else's feed.
• Keep the provenance attached. A reading without its timestamp becomes a claim about now, and a modelled value without its label becomes a measurement. Both are the specific failures this project is built to avoid; please do not reintroduce them downstream.
• The code is MIT-licensed. The calculation, the thresholds and the wording of every health message are in the source repository (Opens in a new window) under the MIT licence (Opens in a new window). The licence covers the code, not the measurements it renders.

What this site does not promise

The site is provided as it is, without warranty. That is not boilerplate here — the specific limits are known, documented, and worth stating plainly.

• The figures are provisional. Near-real-time readings are provisional. ERA validates data after publication, and figures may be revised.
• Availability is not guaranteed. The site depends on an upstream feed it does not control. Instruments go offline for maintenance and calibration, hours go missing, and the feed itself can be unavailable. When a value is absent it is shown as absent — never as zero.
• Five stations cannot describe every locality. A station reading applies to the air at that monitor. Your street may differ, and Għarb is the only station on Gozo.
• Nothing here establishes legal compliance. Almost every EU limit value is an average over 24 hours or a calendar year, and several permit a set number of exceedances before the limit is breached. A single hourly reading above a threshold is not a breach, and this site will not describe one as such.
• Forecasts are estimates. Modelled and gap-filled values are labelled as estimates wherever they appear, and are never presented as observations.

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

In an emergency, follow official instructions rather than this page.

Changes, and how to raise something

These terms may change as the site does. Because the whole site is version-controlled in public, every change to this page has a dated commit behind it, which is a more useful record than a “last updated” line maintained by hand.

If something here is wrong, unclear, or overstates what the data supports, please say so — Contact.