Average Hourly Concentrations of Air Contaminants in Selected Urban, Town, and Rural Sites

Robert Cichowicz,Artur Stelęgowski

doi:10.1007/s00244-019-00627-8

Abstract

The inhabitants of cities, towns, and villages are exposed to different levels of air pollution, which also vary throughout the day. Information regarding episodes of poor and good air quality enables planning to mitigate the risks and maximize the benefits of spending time outdoors. In this work, an analysis was made of the state of air quality 2012–2016, using data gathered from automatic measuring stations located in five cities (> 50,000 inhabitants), five towns (5000–50,000 inhabitants), and five villages (< 5000 inhabitants) in five neighboring provinces in central Poland, in Central Europe. The monitoring stations were designated as “city background”, “town background”, and “rural background”. More than 3 million pieces of data were collected from 15 monitoring stations. This allowed the average daily changes in the concentration of air pollutants (NO2 and NOx, O3, SO2, CO, PM10, PM2.5, C6H6) to be determined, depending on the type of station and the size of the settlement unit in both winter periods and summer periods. As a result, the most and least favorable hours in terms of levels of air pollution were identified. This information could help to inform air quality management in modern cities, towns, and villages and to improve the quality of life, particularly among those most susceptible to the negative effects of air pollution, such as the elderly and children.Graphical

Highlights

Worldwide air quality poses a risk both to human health and the wider environment (Agudelo-Castañeda et al 2019; Ramírez et al 2019; Oliveira et al 2019)
Studies on air pollution focus on inhabited areas (Cichowicz et al 2017; Cichowicz 2018; Pérez et al 2010) and on agricultural and undeveloped areas, which are used as background measurements (Hagenbjörk et al 2017; Putaud et al 2004; Zheng et al 2010)
These measurement stations are located in the vicinity of point, areal, and linear emission sources and provide data on the air quality in areas of, inter alia, “urban traffic/kerbside” (UT), “urban background” (CB), “suburban background” (SB), “rural background” (RB), and “natural background” (NB) pollution (Putaud et al 2004)

Summary

Introduction

Worldwide air quality poses a risk both to human health and the wider environment (Agudelo-Castañeda et al 2019; Ramírez et al 2019; Oliveira et al 2019). In SPs, the mean hourly NO2 concentrations ranged from 8.29 to 60.10 μg m−3, from 4.47 to 36.33 μg m−3, and from 1.75 to 4.47 μg m−3 for cities, towns, and rural areas, Table 4 Methods of measuring air pollution at measuring stations

Results

Conclusion