Spatiotemporal mixed effects modeling for the estimation of PM2.5 from MODIS AOD over the Indian subcontinent

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe physical processes associated with the constituents of the troposphere, such as aerosols have an immediate impact on human health. This study employs a novel method to calibrate Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) obtained from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS – Terra satellite) for estimating surface PM2.5 concentration. The Combined Deep Blue Deep Target daily product from the MODIS AOD data acquired across the Indian Subcontinent was used as input, and the daily averaged PM2.5pollution level data obtained from 33 monitoring stations spread across the country was used for calibration. Mixed Effect Models (MEM) is a linear model to deal with non-independent data from multiple levels or hierarchy using fixed and random effects of dependent parameters. MEM was applied to the dataset obtained for the period from January to August 2017. The MEM considers a fixed and random component, where the random components model the daily variations of the AOD – PM2.5 relationships, site-specific adjustment parameters, temporal (meteorological) variables such as temperature, and spatial variables such as the percentage of agricultural area, forest cover, barren land and road density with the resolution of 10 km × 10 km. Estimation accuracy was improved from an R2 value of 0.66 from our earlier study (when PM2.5 was modeled against only AOD and site-specific parameters) toR2 value of 0.75 upon the inclusion of spatiotemporal (meteorological) variables with increased % within Expected Error from 18% to 35%, reduced Mean Bias Error from 3.22 to 0.11 and reduced RMSE from 29.11 to 20.09. We also found that spline interpolation performed better than IDW and Kriging inefficiently estimating the PM2.5 concentrations wherever there were missing AOD data. The estimated minimum PM2.5 is 93 ± 25μg/m3 which itself is in the upper limit of the hazardous level while the maximum is estimated as 170 ± 70μg/m3. The study has thus made it possible to determine the daily spatial variations of PM2.5 concentrations across the Indian subcontinent utilizing satellite-based AOD data.