Abstract
In recent years, the pollution monitoring in urban areas has become one of the most critical issues for local public authorities, which wish (or must) verify that pollution levels not exceed limits considered unsafe or that are regulated by local laws. Generally, the pollution monitoring is performed by using measurement stations located in few points of the region of interest since these stations are generally characterized by high costs, weights, and dimensions. Then, the pollution levels over the remaining area are predicted by means of suitable interpolation models. Due to the great variety of urban scenarios, it becomes very difficult to obtain reliable pollution levels in area in which the measurements has not been directly taken but only predicted. Consequently, the pollution monitoring can suffer of a lack of reliable information indispensable for the actuation of proper environmental management policies.<br />In this framework, this paper proposes a mobile measurement system for the real time monitoring of environmental pollutions over urban areas. The proposed approach is based on the use of a set of vehicles, typically employed for public transportation inside the urban area, equipped with the proposed mobile measurement system allowing it to measure, store, and transmit the acquired data to a remote supervisor unit somewhere on the path followed by the vehicles. Particular attention has been paid on the definition of the metrological characteristics of the measurement devices with the aims of complying with the applicable European Directives accuracy requirements and of selecting a suitable trade-off between accuracy and cost. The experimental measurement campaign performed on a suitable urban scenario has confirmed the goodness of the proposed system. <br />
Highlights
The timely and reliable knowledge of environmental pollution in urban areas has become, in recent years, one of the most critical issues for local public authorities, even for the not negligible impact with regard to political and social choices to be made
For the sake of brevity, only the results related to the carbon monoxide (CO), NO2, and O3 will be reported in the following
(i) of validating the Measurement Unit (MMU) performance by means of a comparison between the results obtained from the MMU and those obtained from a calibrated traditional measurement instrumentation, positioned at the same location; to this aim, a DASIBI 2108 Chemiluminescent Nitrogen Oxide Analyzer, a DASIBI 2003 Ozone Analyzer, and a ML9830B Carbon Monoxide Analyzer were used as reference instruments; (ii) of evaluating the distribution of pollutants in an extended area, by means of a great number of measurements acquired during predefined paths performed by using a service vehicle on which the MMU was installed; the measurements were elaborated by means of suitable procedures, running on the Central Supervisor System (CSS), which perform the elaboration of Voronoi diagrams and the kriging variograms
Summary
The timely and reliable knowledge of environmental pollution in urban areas has become, in recent years, one of the most critical issues for local public authorities, even for the not negligible impact with regard to political and social choices to be made. By adopting a suitable data management technique, it is possible to perform the integration of the information in "clusters" of data This approach makes possible, with a small number of devices, to achieve full coverage, accurate, and timely provision of pollutions in wide areas. Key features of the proposed system, thought to be located on public urban ground transportation vehicles, are the significant low cost, the high portability of the measurement units, the autonomous power supply, and the measurement strategy able to minimize the measurement uncertainty To these aims, suitable interpolation techniques aggregating data acquired over the spatial and time domains can be applied. To validate the proposed system, a measurement campaign has been performed on a suitable urban area
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