In the 1980s, three ambitious international programmes on atmospheric corrosion (ISOCORRAG, ICP/UNECE and MICAT), involving the participation of a total of 38 countries on four continents, Europe, America, Asia and Oceania, were launched. Though each programme has its own particular characteristics, the similarity of the basic methodologies used makes it possible to integrate the databases obtained in each case. This paper addresses such an integration with the aim of establishing simple universal damage functions (DF) between first year carbon steel corrosion in the different atmospheres and available environmental variables, both meteorological (temperature (T), relative humidity (RH), precipitation (P), and time of wetness (TOW)) and pollution (SO₂ and NaCl). In the statistical processing of the data, it has been chosen to differentiate between marine atmospheres and those in which the chloride deposition rate is insignificant (<3 mg/m².d). In the DF established for non-marine atmospheres a great influence of the SO₂ content in the atmosphere was seen, as well as lesser effects by the meteorological parameters of RH and T. Both NaCl and SO₂ pollutants, in that order, are seen to be the most influential variables in marine atmospheres, along with a smaller impact of TOW.
Keywords: ICP/UNECE; ISOCORRAG; MICAT; atmospheric corrosion; carbon steel; damage function.