Abstract
Formaldehyde (HCHO) is one of the most important carcinogenic air contaminants in outdoor air. However, the lack of monitoring of the global surface concentration of HCHO is currently hindering research on outdoor HCHO pollution. Traditional methods are either restricted to small areas or, for research on a global scale, too data-demanding. To alleviate this issue, we adopted neural networks to estimate the 2019 global surface HCHO concentration with confidence intervals, utilizing HCHO vertical column density data from TROPOMI, and in-situ data from HAPs (harmful air pollutants) monitoring networks and the ATom mission. Our results show that the global surface HCHO average concentration is 2.30 μg/m3. Furthermore, in terms of regions, the concentrations in the Amazon Basin, Northern China, South-east Asia, the Bay of Bengal, and Central and Western Africa are among the highest. The results from our study provide the first dataset on global surface HCHO concentration. In addition, the derived confidence intervals of surface HCHO concentration add an extra layer of confidence to our results. As a pioneering work in adopting confidence interval estimation to AI-driven atmospheric pollutant research and the first global HCHO surface distribution dataset, our paper paves the way for rigorous study of global ambient HCHO health risk and economic loss, thus providing a basis for pollution control policies worldwide.
Highlights
Formaldehyde (HCHO) is a carcinogenic trace gas and toxic pollutant in the atmosphere [1]
For the sake of stabilizing the training and prediction procedure, instead of stacking full-connection and non-linear activation layers, we proposed to stack BFR blocks, which are made up of a batch normalization layer, a full connection layer and a ReLU activation layer sequentially
It can be seen that in-situ concentration is negatively correlated with height and positively correlated with vertical column density (VCD)
Summary
Formaldehyde (HCHO) is a carcinogenic trace gas and toxic pollutant in the atmosphere [1]. It is considered to be one of the most important carcinogens in outdoor air by the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) among 187 harmful air pollutants (HAPs) [2], and accounts for more than 50% of the total risk of HAP-related cancer in the United States [3]. Thirteen out of every one million people are afflicted with nasopharyngeal carcinoma after being exposed to an average concentration of one microgram per cubic meter of HCHO over a lifetime [4]. Surface concentration represents the amount of HCHO that people are exposed to, and is the direct data source of health risk estimation.
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