10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Abstract View
City Wide Mobile Air Sensor Network (MASEN) in Hong Kong for Evidence Based Air Quality Management
ZHI NING, Fenhuan Yang, Dane Westerdahl, City University of Hong Kong
Abstract Number: 783 Working Group: Low-Cost and Portable Sensors
Abstract In urban areas, vehicles emissions are a major source of air pollution (HEI, 2010), especially particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). This study presents the recent work in Hong Kong using mobile air sensors on buses to form a large scale sensor network with continuous measurements of PM2.5, NO, NO2, CO and CO2 pollutants along more than 40 bus routes. We have found high heterogeneity of the pollutants concentrations in more complex urban terrain with its complexity in built environment, which poses an increasing challenge to accurately quantify and assess trend of air pollution for science based evidence collection for policy making. The mobile sensor network data also showed interesting effect of combined impact of local and regional pollutions. This also leads to increasing consideration and discussions for a new monitoring paradigm shift from static ambient monitoring to spatio-temporally resolved higher density monitoring network. Recent technological advances in air monitoring allow unprecedented opportunities for such air monitoring network using low cost and high quality sensors, which require less infrastructure support than the traditional stationary monitoring stations. New sensing techniques in dense and complex urban environments can be operated at a fraction of the cost of conventional devices and produces unprecedented “big data” in high temporal and spatial resolution. Such mobile network would also have high potential to supplement the existing regulatory air monitoring networks, and provide evidence of association between the roadway network traffic and the air quality in different urban areas.