A new approach for determining optimal placement of PM2.5 air quality sensors: case study for the contiguous United States

01/04/2022
by   Makoto M. Kelp, et al.
0

Considerable financial resources are allocated for measuring ambient air pollution in the United States, yet the locations for these monitoring sites may not be optimized to capture the full extent of current pollution variability. Prior research on best sensor placement for monitoring fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution is scarce: most studies do not span areas larger than a medium-sized city or examine timescales longer than one week. Here we present a pilot study using multiresolution modal decomposition (mrDMD) to identify the optimal placement of PM2.5 sensors from 2000-2016 over the contiguous United States. This novel approach incorporates the variation of PM2.5 on timescales ranging from one day to over a decade to capture air pollution variability. We find that the mrDMD algorithm identifies high-priority sensor locations in the western United States, but a significantly lower density of sensors than expected along the eastern coast, where a large number of EPA PM2.5 monitors currently reside. Specifically, 53 of mrDMD optimized sensor locations are west of the 100th meridian, compared to only 32 PM2.5 from wildfires and high pollution events, with particularly high skill in the West. These results suggest significant gaps in the current EPA monitoring network in the San Joaquin Valley in California, northern California, and in the Pacific Northwest (Idaho, and Eastern Washington and Oregon). Our framework diagnoses where to place air quality sensors so that they can best monitor smoke from wildfires. Our framework may also be applied to urban areas for equitable placement of PM2.5 monitors.

READ FULL TEXT

page 8

page 10

page 11

research
12/19/2020

Optimising Placement of Pollution Sensors in Windy Environments

Air pollution is one of the most important causes of mortality in the wo...
research
03/26/2022

Network of Low-cost Air Quality Sensor for Monitoring Indoor, Outdoor, and Personal PM2.5 Exposure in Seattle during the 2020 Wildfire Season

The increased frequency of wildfires in the Western United States has ra...
research
03/13/2022

Impact of sensor placement in soil water estimation: A real-case study

One of the essential elements in implementing a closed-loop irrigation s...
research
11/21/2022

Sensor Placement for Online Fault Diagnosis

Fault diagnosis is the problem of determining a set of faulty system com...
research
02/28/2023

Efficient Sensor Placement from Regression with Sparse Gaussian Processes in Continuous and Discrete Spaces

We present a novel approach based on sparse Gaussian processes (SGPs) to...
research
05/06/2022

Investigating Use of Low-Cost Sensors to Increase Accuracy and Equity of Real-Time Air Quality Information

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality (AQ) monitors, the gol...
research
02/15/2022

Bayesian Optimisation for Active Monitoring of Air Pollution

Air pollution is one of the leading causes of mortality globally, result...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset