CoNOAir: A Neural Operator for Forecasting Carbon Monoxide Evolution in Cities

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoNOAir, a neural operator model that accurately forecasts carbon monoxide levels in cities, enabling real-time pollution management and early warning systems at national scales.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel neural operator model, CoNOAir, that outperforms existing models in predicting CO concentrations for urban and country-level applications.

Findings

CoNOAir achieves R2 > 0.95 in hourly CO prediction across multiple Indian cities.

The model effectively captures extreme pollution events.

It outperforms Fourier neural operators in accuracy and reliability.

Abstract

Carbon Monoxide (CO) is a dominant pollutant in urban areas due to the energy generation from fossil fuels for industry, automobile, and domestic requirements. Forecasting the evolution of CO in real-time can enable the deployment of effective early warning systems and intervention strategies. However, the computational cost associated with the physics and chemistry-based simulation makes it prohibitive to implement such a model at the city and country scale. To address this challenge, here, we present a machine learning model based on neural operator, namely, Complex Neural Operator for Air Quality (CoNOAir), that can effectively forecast CO concentrations. We demonstrate this by developing a country-level model for short-term (hourly) and long-term (72-hour) forecasts of CO concentrations. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models such as Fourier neural operators (FNO) and provides reliable predictions for both short and long-term forecasts. We further analyse the capability of the model to capture extreme events and generate forecasts in urban cities in India. Interestingly, we observe that the model predicts the next hour CO concentrations with R2 values greater than 0.95 for all the cities considered. The deployment of such a model can greatly assist the governing bodies to provide early warning, plan intervention strategies, and develop effective strategies by considering several what-if scenarios. Altogether, the present approach could provide a fillip to real-time predictions of CO pollution in urban cities.