A Non-stationary, Amortized, Transfer Learning Approach for Modeling Italian Air Quality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a transfer learning framework combining chemical transport models and ground station data to produce detailed, uncertainty-quantified air quality maps for Italy using a non-stationary geostatistical approach.

Contribution

It develops a novel non-stationary, anisotropic spatial transfer-learning method leveraging neural architectures and basis functions for high-resolution air quality modeling.

Findings

The method improves spatial predictions over stationary models.

It efficiently estimates millions of spatially varying parameters.

The approach provides detailed, uncertainty-quantified NO2 maps for Italy.

Abstract

Air quality monitoring in Italy relies on sparse, irregular, ground-based stations that provide high-quality but incomplete measurements of pollution. Chemical transport models (CTMs) offer full spatial and temporal coverage but smooth over local variability. We develop a spatial transfer-learning framework that integrates these two data sources to produce daily, fine-grid predictions of nitrogen dioxide (NO$_2$) concentrations across Italy for 2023, with uncertainty quantification. The resulting maps provide a resource for decision making in downstream applications such as epidemiology and environmental policy. Our approach builds on the geostatistical LatticeKrig framework, which uses compactly supported basis functions and coefficients governed by a sparse precision matrix. We learn a nonstationary, anisotropic correlation structure from the gridded CTM outputs using an image-to-image neural architecture that estimates millions of spatially varying parameters in a matter of seconds. The basis-function representation enables this covariance structure to be transferred to the point-level station data and projected onto a finer prediction grid, a key extension for handling the change of support between data sources. A likelihood-based refinement step then adjusts the correlation range to recover fine-scale variability smoothed out by the gridded data. The proposed methodology results in a flexible, non-stationary, and anisotropic representation of the spatial process, better accommodating the complex geography of Italy. Performance is assessed through experiments on both gridded CTM outputs and point-level station measurements, demonstrating improvements over the stationary formulation.