Debiasing physico-chemical models in air quality monitoring by combining different pollutant concentration measures

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to improve air quality maps by modeling and correcting biases in physicochemical models using diverse pollutant measurements, including micro-sensors and reference stations.

Contribution

It introduces a bias modeling approach that combines data from different sources to enhance the accuracy of air quality estimations and sensor understanding.

Findings

Improved nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter concentration maps.

Effective bias correction for physicochemical models.

Enhanced understanding of micro-sensor contributions.

Abstract

Air quality monitoring requires to produce accurate estimation of nitrogen dioxide or fine particulate matter concentration maps, at different moments. A typical strategy is to combine different types of data. On the one hand, concentration maps produced by deterministic physicochemical models at urban scale, and on the other hand, concentration measures made at different points, different moments, and by different devices. These measures are provided first by a small number of reference stations, which give reliable measurements of the concentration, and second by a larger number of micro-sensors, which give biased and noisier measurements. The proposed approach consists in modeling the bias of the physicochemical model and estimating the parameters of this bias using all the available concentration measures. Our model relies on a partition of the geographical space of interest into different zones within which the bias is assumed to be modeled by a single affine transformation of the actual concentration. Our approach allows to improve the concentration maps provided by the deterministic models but also to understand the behavior of micro-sensors and their contribution in improving air quality monitoring. We introduce the model, detail its implementation and experiment it through numerical results using datasets collected in Grenoble (France).