Search results for "Air Quality"

Robustness of air quality indicators: a study of PM10 levels in Scotland

2008

Air quality assessment via functional principal component analysis

2009

The knowledge of the global urban air quality situation represents the first step to face air pollution issues. For the last decades many urban areas can rely on a monitoring network, recording hourly data for the main pollutants. Such data need to be aggregated according to different dimensions, such as time, space and type of pollutant, in order to provide a synthetic air quality index which takes into account interactions among pollutants and correlation among monitoring sites.This paper focuses on Functional Principal Component techniques for the statistical analysis of a set of environmental data x(spt), where s stands for the monitoring site, p for the pollutant and t for time, usuall…

Urban PM10 air quality indicator sensitivity

2008

Aggregate air pollution indices: a new proposal

2009

A new aggregate Air Quality Index (I2) to represent the global air pollution situation for a given city/region is proposed. Accounting for simultaneous exposure to common pollutants and their effects on human health, this index overcomes existing AQIs. Its goodness and utility is shown by a simulation plan and by an application to a real dataset on main pollutants.

Control of indoor environments in heritage buildings: experimental measurements in an old Italian museum and proposal of a methodology

2005

Abstract This paper describes some results from an experiment carried out regarding a procedure to be adopted for temperature and R.H. monitoring of indoor spaces designed for exhibiting events, such as museums and similar institutions. The monitored data employed in this study has been collected by the Department di Ricerche Energetiche ed Ambientali of the Universita degli Studi di Palermo in co-operation with the Regional Gallery ''Palazzo Abatellis'' of Palermo. The study analyses a simple method for characterising the environmental quality of museums so as to ensure the optimal conservation of works of art. This methodology is based on the procedure (where thermal and hygrometry parame…

Indoor air quality of everyday use spaces dedicated to specific purposes—a review

2017

According to literature data, some of the main factors which significantly affect the quality of the indoor environment in residential households or apartments are human activities such as cooking, smoking, cleaning, and indoor exercising. The paper presents a literature overview related to air quality in everyday use spaces dedicated to specific purposes which are integral parts of residential buildings, such as kitchens, basements, and individual garages. Some aspects of air quality in large-scale car parks, as a specific type of indoor environment, are also discussed. All those areas are characterized by relatively short time use. On the other hand, high and very high concentration level…

Visually low-impacting methods for the measurement of parameters related to IAQ risk indicators in exhibition halls

2021

Microclimate for cultural heritage plays a fundamental role in the degradation process of artefacts exhibited in museums. Generally, the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) monitoring inside museums is based on conventional measurements of thermo-hygrometry parameters and longtime averaged measurements of atmospheric pollutants’ concentration. Unfortunately, all these approaches require electric supply and are usually characterized by a noticeable visual impact on the exhibition space, which clearly negatively affects the visitors’ experience. This paper intends to revisit and discuss a methodology (and its test application on field, to estimate the risk of damage of three artefacts displayed in an ol…

The driving factors of new particle formation and growth in the polluted boundary layer

2021

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Mao Xiao et al. New particle formation (NPF) is a significant source of atmospheric particles, affecting climate and air quality. Understanding the mechanisms involved in urban aerosols is important to develop effective mitigation strategies. However, NPF rates reported in the polluted boundary layer span more than 4 orders of magnitude, and the reasons behind this variability are the subject of intense scientific debate. Multiple atmospheric vapours have been postulated to participate in NPF, including sulfuric acid, ammonia, amines and organics, but their relative roles remain unclear. We investigated NPF in the CLOUD chamber using mixtures of anthropogenic vap…

A case study of the radiative effect of aerosols over Europe: EUCAARI-LONGREX

2016

Abstract. The radiative effect of anthropogenic aerosols over Europe during the 2008 European Integrated Project on Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interactions Long Range Experiment (EUCAARI-LONGREX) campaign has been calculated using measurements collected by the Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) BAe-146 aircraft and radiative transfer modelling. The aircraft sampled anthropogenically perturbed air masses across north-western Europe under anticyclonic conditions with aerosol optical depths ranging from 0.047 to 0.357. For one specially designed “radiative closure” flight, simulated irradiances have been compared to radiation measurements for a case of aged Europe…

Comparative assessment of RAMS and WRF short-term forecasts over Eastern Iberian Peninsula using various in-situ observations, remote sensing product…

2018

The Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) and the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale models are being used for weather and air quality studies as well as forecasting tools in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems. In the current study, we perform a comparative assessment of these models under distinct typical atmospheric conditions, classified according to the dominant wind flow and cloudiness, over Eastern Iberian Peninsula. This study is focused on the model representation of key physical processes in terms of meteorology and surface variables during a 7-days period in summer 2011. The hourly outputs produced by these two models are compared not only with observed…