Abstract
Sensor networks are being more widely used to
characterize and understand compounds in the atmosphere like ozone
(O3). This study employs a measurement tool, called the U-Pod,
constructed at the University of Colorado Boulder, to investigate spatial
and temporal variability of O3 in a 200 km2 area of Riverside
County near Los Angeles, California. This tool contains low-cost sensors to
collect ambient data at non-permanent locations. The U-Pods were calibrated
using a pre-deployment field calibration technique; all the U-Pods were
collocated with regulatory monitors. After collocation, the U-Pods were
deployed in the area mentioned. A subset of pods was deployed at two local
regulatory air quality monitoring stations providing validation for the
collocation calibration method. Field validation of sensor O3
measurements to minute-resolution reference observations resulted in R2
and root mean squared errors (RMSEs) of 0.95–0.97 and 4.4–5.9 ppbv,
respectively. Using the deployment data, ozone concentrations were observed
to vary on this small spatial scale. In the analysis based on hourly binned
data, the median R2 values between all possible U-Pod pairs varied from
0.52 to 0.86 for ozone during the deployment. The medians of absolute
differences were calculated between all possible pod pairs, 21 pairs total.
The median values of those median absolute differences for each hour of the
day varied between 2.2 and 9.3 ppbv for the ozone deployment. Since median
differences between U-Pod concentrations during deployment are larger than
the respective root mean square error values, we can conclude that there is
spatial variability in this criteria pollutant across the study area. This
is important because it means that citizens may be exposed to more, or less,
ozone than they would assume based on current regulatory monitoring.
Citation
ID:
164752
Ref Key:
sadighi2018atmosphericintra-urban