Air pollutant concentrations

About: Air pollutant concentrations is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1652 publications have been published within this topic receiving 36138 citations.

Environmental Monitoring and Analysis on Air Pollution Issue in China

Abstract: This article studied about the air pollution in China. The main causes of the air quality deterioration in the country were analyzed as well as possible ways of the environmental situation improvement were suggested.

Sampling for estimation of air pollution levels and air pollution environmental effects

Abstract: Introduction In Europe, the impetus for control of transboundary air pollution has been the detrimental effects of the pollutants on both human health and on the state of the environment. In assessing the environmental effects the difficult issue is to estimate the damage to a particular species or to an ecosystem. For example, the major European controls on sulphur emissions followed the loss of fish from Scandinavian lakes and the association with acidity of the water. However, in many circumstances, air pollution does not lead immediately to easily observable loss of species or ecosystem change. The effects of pollutants can often be cumulative within the ecosystem and pollution damage may be seen as a change in growth rate of a plant or an increased susceptibility to damage from other stresses such as frost. In complex ecosystems, the extrapolation of the results from controlled laboratory or field experiments can be misleading, especially if complex interactions between vegetation and soils are the most important factors in determining actual damage. When studying ecosystem damage, colocated sampling for air pollution levels and vegetation effects is optimal but can be difficult to implement. Vegetation sampling on a specific day or on several days over a longer period is relatively easy and low cost. The plants, however, may have accumulated air pollutants either through rainfall or by direct gas uptake over a much longer time scale. The air pollution monitoring necessary to determine that uptake (or deposition) can be quite costly and may require effort over an extended period. National or regional air pollution monitoring networks will predict pollution levels over large areas and there is a cost benefit in using this data in place of local monitoring. However the sampling strategy for these networks has been decided on different criteria, and the link between the vegetation sampling strategy and the monitoring network strategy becomes crucial. Sampling to detect vegetation effects is of little value if the uncertainty in pollution model predicted exposure is too large. In all deposition models the pollutant concentration is critical in estimating deposition. The behaviour of the chemical species in the atmosphere is important when choosing how to monitor pollutant concentration levels. Emitted sulphur dioxide mainly returns through the wet deposition of sulphate in rain, which has often remained in the atmosphere for 3 to 6 days and has travelled 3000 to 5000 km from source. Therefore the rainfall sulphate concentrations are expected to be spatially quite smooth and sampling sites may be well spaced out. By contrast, ammonia gas has a very short residence time in the atmosphere, travelling only the order of 1 km in a few minutes. This leads to highly variable concentrations in source areas and very intensive spatial monitoring would be required. In this paper, three air pollution monitoring networks will be considered in terms of their ability to support vegetation and ecosystem sampling studies.

Analysis of the Zero-Out Method of Source Apportionment for Air Quality Modeling in Spain

Abstract: The zero-out method of source apportionment was applied to air pollutant concentrations (ozone, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter) from an air quality simulation for Spain and the suitability of the method was analysed.