Characterizing outdoor infiltration and indoor contribution of PM2.5 with citizen-based low-cost monitoring data

Abstract

Epidemiological research on the adverse health outcomes due to PM2.5 exposure frequently relies on measurements from regulatory air quality monitors to provide ambient exposure estimates, whereas personal PM2.5 exposure may deviate from ambient concentrations due to outdoor infiltration and contributions from indoor sources. Research in quantifying infiltration factors (Finf), the fraction of outdoor PM2.5 that infiltrates indoors, has been historically limited in space and time due to the high costs of monitor deployment and maintenance. Recently, the growth of openly accessible, citizen-based PM2.5 measurements provides an unprecedented opportunity to characterize Finf at large spatiotemporal scales. In this analysis, 91 consumer-grade PurpleAir indoor/outdoor monitor pairs were identified in California (41 residential houses and 50 public/commercial buildings) during a 20-month period with around 650000h of paired PM2.5 measurements. An empirical method was developed based on local polynomial regression to estimate site-specific Finf. The estimated site-specific Finf had a mean of 0.26 (25th, 75th percentiles: [0.15, 0.34]) with a mean bootstrap standard deviation of 0.04. The Finf estimates were toward the lower end of those reported previously. A threshold of ambient PM2.5 concentration, approximately 30μg/m3, below which indoor sources contributed substantially to personal exposures, was also identified. The quantified relationship between indoor source contributions and ambient PM2.5 concentrations could serve as a metric of exposure errors when using outdoor monitors as an exposure proxy (without considering indoor-generated PM2.5), which may be of interest to epidemiological research. The proposed method can be generalized to larger geographical areas to better quantify PM2.5 outdoor infiltration and personal exposure.