Using low-cost sensors to improve NO2 concentration maps derived from physico-chemical models

TL;DR

This paper presents a Bayesian framework to enhance NO2 pollution maps by integrating unreliable low-cost sensor data with deterministic physico-chemical models, improving accuracy in urban air quality monitoring.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to calibrate low-cost sensors and correct model biases simultaneously, demonstrated on data from Rouen, France.

Findings

Reduced root mean squared error by approximately 12.4% in NO2 maps.

Low-cost sensors significantly improve model correction.

The approach effectively calibrates sensors and refines pollution estimates.

Abstract

Urban air quality is a major concern today. Concentrations of pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, must be monitored to ensure that they do not exceed hazardous thresholds. For this reason, scarse reference stations, which are generally managed by air quality monitoring associations, are located in major cities. Two recent approaches enable fine-scale mapping of pollutant concentrations. The first relies on deterministic physico-chemical models that incorporate the street network and compute concentration estimates on a grid, producing spatial maps. The second is based on the emergence of low-cost sensors, which enable monitoring organizations to increase the density of their measurement networks. However, these sensors are unreliable and require regular and important calibration. We propose to combine these approaches and improve maps generated by deterministic models by integrating data from multiple sensor networks. Specifically, we model the bias of deterministic models and estimate its parameters using measurements, through a Bayesian nested framework. Our approach simultaneously enables the calibration of low-cost sensors and the correction of deterministic models outputs. This method, although general, is applied to the city of Rouen (France), combining outputs of the physico-chemical model SIRANE (Soulhac et al. 2011) and the measurements provided both by 4 reference monitoring stations and 10 low-cost sensors during December 2022. Results show that the method indeed corrects the concentration maps, reducing the root mean squared error by approximately 12.4%, and that low-cost sensors play an essential role in this correction.