Abstract
The paper is devoted to the development of a statistical framework for air quality assessment at the country level and for the evaluation of the ambient population exposure and risk with respect to airborne pollutants. The framework is based on a multivariate space–time model and on aggregated indices defined at different levels of aggregation in space and time. The indices are evaluated, uncertainty included, by considering both the model outputs and the information on the population spatial distribution. The framework is applied to the analysis of air quality data for Scotland for 2009 referring to European and Scottish air quality legislation.
Highlights
IntroductionEuropean legislation on air quality (Directive 2008/50/EC) identifies the needs for improved monitoring and assessment of air quality, including ‘to provide information to the public’
European legislation on air quality (Directive 2008/50/EC) identifies the needs for improved monitoring and assessment of air quality, including ‘to provide information to the public’.The aim of this paper is to provide a model-based statistical framework for air quality assessment and the evaluation of population exposure and risk in a national context and applied to Scotland
Description of the data The sources of data that are considered in this work are essentially three: the ground level concentration of airborne pollutants, measured by the Scottish automatic urban network, the population spatial distribution downloaded from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the meteorological covariates downloaded from the Nasa Global Modeling and Assimilation Office
Summary
European legislation on air quality (Directive 2008/50/EC) identifies the needs for improved monitoring and assessment of air quality, including ‘to provide information to the public’. The aim of this paper is to provide a model-based statistical framework for air quality assessment and the evaluation of population exposure and risk in a national context and applied to Scotland. We aim to provide high resolution ambient exposure maps at the country level Aware that this may introduce an ecological bias (according to Freedman (2001), ‘The ecological fallacy consists in thinking that relationships observed for groups necessarily hold for individuals’), we point out that our approach is an improvement with respect to the current air quality legislation which is based only on temporal averages of the measured pollutant concentration at the monitoring stations. Air quality data for 2009 that were collected over Scotland are considered in Section 5 and analysed within the statistical framework that is developed in this work
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