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Predicting Citywide Distribution of Air Pollution Using Mobile Monitoring and Three-dimensional Urban Structure

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30 April 2021

Posted:

05 May 2021

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Abstract
Understanding the relationships between land cover/urban structure patterns and air pollutants is key to sustainable urban planning and development. In this study, we employ a mobile monitoring method to collect PM2.5 and BC data in the city of Philadelphia, PA during the summer of 2019 and apply the Structure of Urban Landscapes (STURLA) methodology to examine relationships between urban structure and atmospheric pollution. We find that, while PM2.5 and BC vary by STURLA class, many of the differences in pollutant concentrations between classes are not significant. However, we also find that the proportions in which STURLA components are present throughout the urban landscape can be used to predict urban air pollution. Among frequently sampled STURLA classes, gpl hosted the highest PM2.5 concentrations on average (16.60 ± 4.29 µg/m3), while tgbwp hosted the highest BC concentrations (2.31 ± 1.94 µg/m3). Furthermore, STURLA combined with machine learning modeling was able to correlate PM2.5 (R2= 0.68, RMSE 2.82 µg/m3) and BC (R2 = 0.64, RMSE 0.75 µg/m3) concentrations with the urban landscape and spatially interpolate concentrations where sampling did not take place. These results demonstrate the efficacy of the STURLA methodology in modeling relationships between air pollution and land cover/urban structure patterns.
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Subject: Environmental and Earth Sciences  -   Atmospheric Science and Meteorology
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
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