Abstract
Residential wood burning can be a significant wintertime source of ambient fine particles in urban and suburban areas. We developed a statistical model to predict minute (min) levels of particles with median diameter of <1 μm (PM1) from mobile monitoring on evenings of winter weekends at different residential locations in Quebec, Canada, considering wood burning emissions. The 6 s PM1 levels were concurrently measured on 10 preselected routes travelled 3 to 24 times during the winters of 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 by vehicles equipped with a GRIMM or a dataRAM sampler and a Global Positioning System device. Route-specific and global land-use regression (LUR) models were developed using the following spatial and temporal covariates to predict 1-min-averaged PM1 levels: chimney density from property assessment data at sampling locations, PM2.5 “regional background” levels of particles with median diameter of <2.5 μm (PM2.5) and temperature and wind speed at hour of sampling, elevation at sampling locations and day of the week. In the various routes travelled, between 49% and 94% of the variability in PM1 levels was explained by the selected covariates. The effect of chimney density was not negligible in “cottage areas.” The R2 for the global model including all routes was 0.40. This LUR is the first to predict PM1 levels in both space and time with consideration of the effects of wood burning emissions. We show that the influence of chimney density, a proxy for wood burning emissions, varies by regions and that a global model cannot be used to predict PM in regions that were not measured. Future work should consider using both survey data on wood burning intensity and information from numerical air quality forecast models, in LUR models, to improve the generalisation of the prediction of fine particulate levels.
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Abbreviations
- DEM:
-
digital elevation model
- GEM-MACH:
-
Global Environmental MultiScale-Modelling Air quality and CHemistry
- LUR:
-
land use regression
- NAPS:
-
National Air Pollution Surveillance
- PM1:
-
particle with median diameter of <1 μm
- PM2.5:
-
particle with median diameter of <2.5 μm
- RMSE:
-
root mean square error
- TEOM-FDMS:
-
tapered element oscillating microbalance-filter dynamics measurement system
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Acknowledgements
This project was funded by a memorandum of agreement with Health Canada and by the Quebec Fonds Vert. We thank Alexandre Joly and Sabrina Cardin-Ouellette for assistance with mobile monitoring. We also thank the Quebec Ministry of Sustainable Development and Parks and Environment Canada for access to their air pollutant and meteorological surveillance data.
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Smargiassi, A., Brand, A., Fournier, M. et al. A spatiotemporal land-use regression model of winter fine particulate levels in residential neighbourhoods. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 22, 331–338 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2012.26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2012.26
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