Spatial representativeness of air quality monitoring stations: A grid model based approach

A Lagrangian modelling approach to assess the representativeness area of an industrial air quality monitoring station

“…The CSF procedure is here briefly summarized, whereas we refer to Piersanti et al (2015a) for a detailed description. At each time step, the percentage difference between the concentration values measured at the site of interest (coordinates X site ,Y site ,Z 0 ) and at each grid point (coordinates x,y,Z 0 ) in the model domain is calculated and compared to the threshold value of 20%.…”

“…For the quantitative assessment of the atmospheric monitoring stations SR areas, we applied the Concentration Similarity Frequency (CSF) methodology, presented and validated in Piersanti et al (2015a). CSF approach relies on the Nappo et al (1982) detailed definition: "a point measurement is representative of the average in a larger area (or volume) if the probability that the squared difference between point and area (volume) measurement is smaller than a certain threshold more than 90% of the time".…”

“…Indeed, different approaches can be based on various sources of information including: additional air pollutant measurements from specific experimental campaigns (Vardoulakis et al, 2005;Parra et al, 2009) or dense monitoring network (Blanchard et al, 1999;Chow et al, 2006), modelled air pollutant concentrations (Diegmann et al, 2013;Santiago et al, 2013;Martin et al, 2014;Piersanti et al, 2015a;Duyzer et al, 2015), surrogate spatial data e.g. land use (Janssen et al, 2012;Piersanti et al, 2015b) or emission data (Henne et al, 2010;Righini et al, 2014).…”

“…SR area is defined as the area where the concentration does not differ from the concentration measured at the station by more than a specified amount (EEA, 1999;Spangl et al, 2007). The chosen threshold is usually related to measurement uncertainties or data quality objectives and a percentage value of 20% is frequently used (Blanchard et al, 1999;Chow et al, 2006;Santiago et al, 2013;Martin et al, 2014;Piersanti et al, 2015a).…”

“…A recent study (Mangia et al, 2013) has examined the spatial variability of air pollutants concentration in different parts of the city of Taranto: outcomes have pointed out fairly homogeneous PM10 concentrations for all the evaluated monitoring stations, except for IT1611A (Taranto-via Machiavelli) site, that seemed to be clearly influenced by local emission sources. Hence, there is need of a detailed evaluation of the SR of the monitoring station, that was conducted using the Concentration Similarity Frequency approach (Piersanti et al, 2015a).…”