Assessment of Sentinel-5p Performance for Ground-Level Air Quality Monitoring: Preparatory Experiments Over the Covid-19 Lockdown Period

Abstract

Abstract. Scientific evidence has demonstrated that deterioration of ambient air quality has increased the number of deaths worldwide by appointing air pollution among the most pressing sustainability concerns. In this context, the continuous monitoring of air quality and the modelling of complex air pollution patterns is critical to protect population and ecosystems health. Availability of air quality observations has terrifically improved in the last decades allowing – nowadays – for extensive spatial and temporal resolved analysis at both global and local scale. Satellite remote sensing is mostly accountable for this data availability and is promising to foster air quality monitoring in support of traditional ground sensors measurements. In view of the above, this study compares observations from the Sentinel-5P mission of the European Copernicus Programme (the most recent Earth Observation platform providing open measurements of atmospheric constituents) with traditional ground measurements to investigate their space and time correlations across the Lombardy region (Northern Italy). The correlation analysis focused on nitrogen dioxide. The use of data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed for a parallel exploration of the lockdown effects on nitrogen dioxide emissions. Results show a marked decrease in nitrogen dioxide concentrations during the lockdown and an overall strong positive correlation between satellite and ground sensors observations. These experiments are preparatory for future activities that will focus on the development of satellite-based air quality local prediction models, aiming at improving the granularity of the ground-based information available for air quality monitoring and exposure modelling.

Enabling Air Quality Monitoring With the Open Data Cube: Implementation for Sentinel-5p and Ground Sensor Observations

“…The Pearson's correlation coefficients between N O2 satellite estimates and ground sensors observations at each sensor's location were computed using Pandas. Results are reported in Figure 5 and provide insight on the quantitative comparability of the two air quality observations (Oxoli et al, 2020) by suggesting the ODC as a valuable tool to perform such investigations. The outcome of the presented work demonstrates that integration of new data sources into the ODC is possible, although a pre-processing procedure is needed to comply with the system requirements.…”

A novel architecture of Web-GIS for mapping and analysis of echinococcosis in Poland

“…New topics include methods of contact tracking for early detection of possible infections (Benreguia et al, 2020 ) (Boulos & Geraghty 2020 ) and analysis of the availability and adequacy of open datasets for studying the spatio-temporal spread of the virus (Brovelli & Coetzee, 2021 ) (Mooney et al, 2021 ). Additionally, the introduction of lockdowns has given the scientific community a unique opportunity to study the impact of travel restrictions on both mental and physical health of people (Adams-Prassl et al, 2020 ) (Basu et al, 2020 ) (Marino et al, 2021 ) as well as the state of environment pollution (Arora et al, 2020 ) (Oxoli et al, 2020 ) (Aman et al, 2020 ).…”

Greenwashing in the US Metal Industry? A Novel Approach Combining SO2 Concentrations From Satellite Data, a Plant-Level Firm Database and Web Text Mining

“…While the traditional ground-based measuring networks are quite extensive in most developed countries and deliver consistent data, they have several shortcomings, e.g. concerning the coverage of rural regions (Oxoli et al, 2020;Cromar et al, 2019). Therefore, satellite data has been used increasingly to monitor the concentration of certain gases in the stratosphere and troposphere since the launch of the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) in 1978.…”

“…While ground sensors actually measure the concentration of air pollutants directly, satellite sensors approximate the concentration based on spectral signatures, using numerical models (Oxoli et al, 2020). The information on SO 2 measured by TROPOMI is the so-called vertical column density, which describes the total of SO 2 molecules in an air column over a unit area (Fioletov et al, 2017).…”

“…Mainly as a consequence of growing industries and populations, the concentrations of many air pollutants in the troposphere have risen over the past decades (Oxoli et al, 2020). Among the primary pollutants that are emitted directly into the atmosphere, sulfur oxides (SO x ) are considered some of the most harmful.…”