A Review of Urban Air Pollution Monitoring and Exposure Assessment Methods

Xingzhe Xie,Sidharta Gautama,Nikos Deligiannis,Frank Pasveer,Evaggelia Tsiligianni,Wilfried Philips,Ivana Semanjski,Raj Rajan

doi:10.3390/ijgi6120389

Abstract

The impact of urban air pollution on the environments and human health has drawn increasing concerns from researchers, policymakers and citizens. To reduce the negative health impact, it is of great importance to measure the air pollution at high spatial resolution in a timely manner. Traditionally, air pollution is measured using dedicated instruments at fixed monitoring stations, which are placed sparsely in urban areas. With the development of low-cost micro-scale sensing technology in the last decade, portable sensing devices installed on mobile campaigns have been increasingly used for air pollution monitoring, especially for traffic-related pollution monitoring. In the past, some reviews have been done about air pollution exposure models using monitoring data obtained from fixed stations, but no review about mobile sensing for air pollution has been undertaken. This article is a comprehensive review of the recent development in air pollution monitoring, including both the pollution data acquisition and the pollution assessment methods. Unlike the existing reviews on air pollution assessment, this paper not only introduces the models that researchers applied on the data collected from stationary stations, but also presents the efforts of applying these models on the mobile sensing data and discusses the future research of fusing the stationary and mobile sensing data.

Highlights

The world energy consumption has increased rapidly due to economic growth, rising populations and industrialization over the last 50 years
Around 90% of human population in European cities are exposed to pollution levels exceeding World Health Organization (WHO) air quality guidelines levels and, as a consequence, it is estimated that the average life expectancy in the European Union is 8.6 months lower [2,3]
To process mobile data on air pollution, researchers have often applied methods designed for fixed sensor networks, even though they are not always well suited for this purpose

Summary

Introduction

The world energy consumption has increased rapidly due to economic growth, rising populations and industrialization over the last 50 years. The burning of fossil fuel produces a huge amount of Carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, causing the Earth surface temperature rise in response. It emits a number of air pollutants such as Carbon monoxide (CO), Sulfur dioxide (SO2), Nitrogen oxides (NOx) and Particulate matters (PM2.5 and PM10). Exposure to these air pollutants has both acute and chronic effects on human health, affecting a number of different systems and organs. The public should be aware of their air quality through pollution monitoring, eventually urging the local and international authorities to take actions on air pollution reduction such as traffic and industrial activity control, land use management, etc

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Conclusion