Mobile monitoring of air pollution - a position paper on use cases, good practices, challenges, and opportunities.

Mobile monitoring has proven to be a very efficient tool to measure and feed into models of air pollution as it complements fixed air quality monitoring networks by adding spatiotemporal resolution. This paper explores best practices, opportunities and challenges related to mobile monitoring of air pollutants, focusing on three key application areas, namely source-, exposure-, and health-related use cases. Use cases are linked to users, ensuring mobile monitoring is effectively tailored to diverse research and policy needs.

WHO air quality database: relevance, history and future developments.

Air pollution is the second most important risk factor for noncommunicable diseases, but air quality monitoring is lacking in many low- and middle-income countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released its 2022 updated air quality database status report. This report contains data from about 6743 human settlements, a sixfold increase from 1102 settlements in its first publication in 2011, which shows that air pollution is increasingly recognized as a health priority at global and national levels.

Characterizing long-term NO concentration surfaces across a large metropolitan area through spatiotemporal land use regression modelling of mobile measurements.

A spatiotemporal land use regression (LUR) model optimized to predict nitrogen dioxide (NO) concentrations obtained from on-road, mobile measurements collected in 2015-16 was independently evaluated using concentrations observed at multiple sites across Toronto, Canada, obtained more than ten years earlier. This spatiotemporal LUR modelling approach improves upon estimates of historical NO concentrations derived from the previously used method of back-extrapolation. The optimal spatiotemporal LUR model (R = 0.

Healthy built environment: Spatial patterns and relationships of multiple exposures and deprivation in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Background: Various aspects of the urban environment and neighbourhood socio-economic status interact with each other to affect health. Few studies to date have quantitatively assessed intersections of multiple urban environmental factors and their distribution across levels of deprivation.

Objectives: To explore the spatial patterns of urban environmental exposures within three large Canadian cities, assess how exposures are distributed across socio-economic deprivation gradients, and identify clusters of favourable or unfavourable environmental characteristics.

Transboundary and traffic influences on air pollution across two Caribbean islands.

Exposure to ambient air pollution has been linked to adverse health outcomes ranging from asthma to premature mortality. However, little to no information exists on the exposure of residents and visitors in the Caribbean islands. While a few previous studies have quantified levels of PM (particulate matter <10 μm) from Sahara dust in Trinidad, our study focussed on a local source of air pollution, traffic emissions.

Near-Road Air Pollutant Measurements: Accounting for Inter-Site Variability Using Emission Factors.

A daily integrated emission factor (EF) method was applied to data from three near-road monitoring sites to identify variables that impact traffic related pollutant concentrations in the near-road environment. The sites were operated for 20 months in 2015-2017, with each site differing in terms of design, local meteorology, and fleet compositions. Measurement distance from the roadway and local meteorology were found to affect pollutant concentrations irrespective of background subtraction.

Underestimation of sulfate concentration in PM2.5 using a semi-continuous particle instrument based on ion chromatography.

Recently, a variety of ion-chromatography-based semi-continuous particle instruments such as the Dionex gas particle ion chromatograph (GP-IC), wet-annular denuder/steam-jet aerosol collector (WAD/SJAC), particle-into-liquid sampler with ion chromatograph (PILS-IC), gas and aerosol monitoring system (GAMS) have been introduced for measuring particle chemical components in the atmosphere. It has been reported that sulfate concentrations in PM2.5 measured by these semi-continuous particle instruments correlate well with those measured by other semi-continuous instruments such as the Aerodyne aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS), R&P 8400S and R&P 8400N analyzers, and Thermo model 5020 sulfate particle analyzer and at times exhibit a unity slope.