Impacts of air pollution and climate on materials in Athens, Greece

Climatic parameters and air pollutants are of major importance for the deterioration of many materials used in buildings and cultural monuments. These pollutants are mainly emitted by industrial and agricultural activities, as well as by the transport sector, and beyond their effects on human health and ecosystems, they also contribute to the deterioration of cultural monuments both on the local scale and over long distances.

In this paper we present the results obtained from the analysis of such observational data that were collected in Athens during the period 2003-2012. According to these results the corrosion/soiling of the particular exposed materials tend to decrease over the years, except for the case of copper. Based on this long experimental database applicable to multi-pollutant situation of the Athens basin we present dose response functions (DRFs) considering, that “dose” stands for the air pollutant concentration, “response” for the material mass loss (normally per annum) and the “function” the relationship derived by the best statistical fit to the data.