A multi-pollutant methodology to locate a single air quality monitoring station in small and medium-size urban areas

©2020. The authors. This document is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This document is the published version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Environmental Pollution. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2020.115279Air quality management is underpinned by continuous measurements of concentrations of target air pollutants in monitoring stations. Although many approaches for optimizing the number and location of air quality monitoring stations are described in the literature, these are usually focused on dense networks. However, there are small and medium-size urban areas that only require one monitoring station but also suffer from severe air pollution. Given that target pollutants are usually measured at the same sampling points; it is necessary to develop a methodology to determine the optimal location of the single station. In this paper, such a methodology is proposed based on maximizing an objective function, that balances between different pollutants measured in the network. The methodology is applied to a set of data available for the city of Cartagena, in southeast Spain. A sensitivity analysis reveals that 2 small areas of the studied city account for 80% of the optimal potential locations, which makes them ideal candidates for setting up the monitoring station. The methodology is easy to implement, robust and supports the decision-making process regarding the siting of fixed sampling sites

An Approach for the Evaluation of Exposure Patterns of Urban Populations to Air Pollution

Exposure concentrations of aromatic compounds were correlated with variables derived from time-microenvironment-activity (TMA) diaries to understand the relationship between exposure patterns and commuting behaviour of the population in a case study in Madrid. Approximately 200 air pollution samples were measured during one-day campaign by means of diffusive samplers. An approach to determine the importance of selected activities and locations relative to a baseline condition, defined by a sample of approximately 100 commuters is described. A regression model is applied to determine the relative importance of identified situations, whether related directly to transport behaviour or through a labelled situation. The regression defines abaseline exposure concentration level where activities act as multiplying factors. The relationship of this baseline level and the set of activity factors, assigned to the population considered, to the ambient background is explored for its application to future studies. The calculation of exposure concentration gradients from the regression provides a means to characterise of the relative importance of different activities. A good level of agreement, in particular for benzene, was evident between the observed exposure concentrations and those calculated using the regression model.JRC.F.8-Sustainable Transpor

An Approach for the Evaluation of Exposure Patterns of Urban Populations to Air Pollution

This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in [JournalTitle]. To access the final edited and published work see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223100800209

Abstracts of the 6th FECS Conference 1998 Lectures

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