Intraurban NO2 hotspot detection across multiple air quality products

High-resolution air quality data products have the potential to help quantify inequitable environmental exposures over space and across time by enabling the identification of hotspots, or areas that consistently experience elevated pollution levels relative to their surroundings. However, when diffe...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Anastasia Montgomery, Madeleine I G Daepp, Marah I Abdin, Pallavi Choudhury, Sara Malvar, Scott Counts, Daniel E Horton
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing 2023-01-01
Series:Environmental Research Letters
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acf7d5
Description
Summary:High-resolution air quality data products have the potential to help quantify inequitable environmental exposures over space and across time by enabling the identification of hotspots, or areas that consistently experience elevated pollution levels relative to their surroundings. However, when different high-resolution data products identify different hotspots, the spatial sparsity of ‘gold-standard’ regulatory observations leaves researchers, regulators, and concerned citizens without a means to differentiate signal from noise. This study compares NO _2 hotspots detected within the city of Chicago, IL, USA using three distinct high-resolution (1.3 km) air quality products: (1) an interpolated product from Microsoft Research’s Project Eclipse—a dense network of over 100 low-cost sensors; (2) a two-way coupled WRF-CMAQ simulation; and (3) a down-sampled product using TropOMI satellite instrument observations. We use the Getis-Ord G _i ^* statistic to identify hotspots of NO _2 and stratify results into high-, medium-, and low-agreement hotspots, including one consensus hotspot detected in all three datasets. Interrogating medium- and low-agreement hotspots offers insights into dataset discrepancies, such as sensor placement and model physics considerations, data retrieval caveats, and the potential for missing emission inventories. When treated as complements rather than substitutes, our work demonstrates that novel air quality products can enable researchers to address discrepancies in data products and can help regulators evaluate confidence in policy-relevant insights.
ISSN:1748-9326