Forecasting of Surface Ozone Concentration by Using Artificial Neural Networks in Rural and Urban Areas in Central Poland

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This paper presents the development of artificial neural network models for the prediction of the daily maximum hourly mean of surface ozone concentration for the next day at rural and urban locations in central Poland. The models were generated with six input variables: forecasted basic meteorological parameters and the maximum O3 concentration recorded on the previous day and number of the month. The training data set covered the period from April 2015 to September 2015. An analogous data set of input variables, for the 2014 year, not used during the process of training the networks, was used as test data to examine the quality of these models. From the results of simulations for the year 2014, the average relative error values were equal to 15.3% and 15.7% for Belsk and Warsaw stations, respectively. The mean error (ME) value indicates a tendency to overestimate the predicted values by 4.8 µg/m3 for Belsk station and to underestimate the predicted values by 0.9 µg/m3 for Warsaw station. The analysis of days when the relative error value was >50% revealed that all predictions with extremely high relative error value were associated with relatively low daily maximum surface ozone concentration values that occurred suddenly due to a sharp drop in day-to-day ozone concentration values.