Adding virtual measuring stations to a network for urban air pollution mapping

Adding virtual measuring stations to a network for urban air pollution mapping

[SPI:SIGNAL] Engineering Sciences/Signal and Image processing

[SDE] Environmental Sciences

[SHS:GEO] Humanities and Social Sciences/Geography

[INFO:INFO_TS] Computer Science/Signal and Image Processing

Maps of pollutants concentration are usually generated by means of interpolation and extrapolation methods. The quality of the results depends mainly of the number of permanent or temporary measuring stations. This paper deals with a method for the virtual densification of the network of stations. The method creates “virtual measuring stations”. It aims at improving the quality of interpolation by increasing the number of data on pollutant concentration. The virtual stations are determined by the means of a classification method applied to each pixel of the area under concern. Discriminating elements are pollutants emission classes, land cover types, urban morphological indicators created to this purpose and distance to major roads. A first implementation was made for particulate matter (PM) for the city of Strasbourg (France) using thin-plates spline interpolation method in Arcview 9 GIS. The relative Root Mean Square Error decreases from 49% for five input stations down to 15% for the virtual stations.

Beaulant, Anne-Lise

Perron, Gilles

Kleinpeter, Joseph

Weber, Christiane

Ranchin, Thierry

Wald, Lucien

Environment international

ISSN:0160-4120

2008

ENG

article in peer-reviewed journal

http://hal-ensmp.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00464795

DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2007.12.004

http://hal-ensmp.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/46/47/95/PDF/V3_environment_international.pdf