Abstract
There is considerable demand for accurate air quality information in human
health analyses. The sparsity of ground monitoring stations across the United
States motivates the need for advanced statistical models to predict air
quality metrics, such as PM2.5, at unobserved sites. Remote sensing
technologies have the potential to expand our knowledge of PM2.5 spatial
patterns beyond what we can predict from current PM2.5 monitoring
networks. Data from satellites have an additional advantage in not requiring
extensive emission inventories necessary for most atmospheric models that
have been used in earlier data fusion models for air pollution. Statistical
models combining monitoring station data with satellite-obtained aerosol optical thickness (AOT), also referred to as aerosol optical depth (AOD),
have been proposed in the literature with varying levels of success in
predicting PM2.5. The benefit of using AOT is that satellites provide
complete gridded spatial coverage. However, the challenges involved with
using it in fusion models are (1) the correlation between the two data
sources varies both in time and in space, (2) the data sources are temporally
and spatially misaligned, and (3) there is extensive missingness in the
monitoring data and also in the satellite data due to cloud cover. We propose
a hierarchical autoregressive spatially varying coefficients model to jointly
model the two data sources, which addresses the foregoing challenges.
Additionally, we offer formal model comparison for competing models in terms
of model fit and out of sample prediction of PM2.5. The models are
applied to daily observations of PM2.5 and AOT in the summer months of
2013 across the conterminous United States. Most notably, during this time
period, we find small in-sample improvement incorporating AOT into our
autoregressive model but little out-of-sample predictive improvement.
Citation
ID:
161578
Ref Key:
schliep2015advancesautoregressive