Abstract
Atmospheric pollution remains one of the major public health threat worldwide
with an estimated 7 millions deaths annually. In Africa, rapid urbanization and
poor transport infrastructure are worsening the problem. In this paper, we have
analysed spatio-temporal variations of PM2.5 across different geographical
regions in Africa. The West African region remains the most affected by the
high levels of pollution with a daily average of 40.856 $\mu g/m^3$ in some
cities like Lagos, Abuja and Bamako. In East Africa, Uganda is reporting the
highest pollution level with a daily average concentration of 56.14 $\mu g/m^3$
and 38.65 $\mu g/m^3$ for Kigali. In countries located in the central region of
Africa, the highest daily average concentration of PM2.5 of 90.075 $\mu g/m^3$
was recorded in N'Djamena. We compare three data driven models in predicting
future trends of pollution levels. Neural network is outperforming Gaussian
processes and ARIMA models.
Citation
ID:
282673
Ref Key:
ndamuzi2022modelling