STEMS-Air: A simple GIS-based air pollution dispersion model for city-wide

exposure assessment
John Gulliver , David Briggs
MRC-HPA Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Imperial College London, London, UK
a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 12 July 2010
Received in revised form 14 February 2011
Accepted 1 March 2011
Available online 31 March 2011
Keywords:
Particulates
PM
10
Exposure
Dispersion modelling
GIS
Air pollution
Current methods of air pollution modelling do not readily meet the needs of air pollution mapping for short-
term (i.e. daily) exposure studies. The main limiting factor is that for those few models that couple with a GIS
there are insufcient tools for directly mapping air pollution both at high spatial resolution and over large
areas (e.g. city wide). A simple GIS-based air pollution model (STEMS-Air) has been developed for PM
10
to
meet these needs with the option to choose different exposure averaging periods (e.g. daily and annual).
STEMS-Air uses the grid-based FOCALSUM function in ArcGIS in conjunction with a ne grid of emission
sources and basic information on meteorology to implement a simple Gaussian plume model of air pollution
dispersion. STEMS-Air was developed and validated in London, UK, using data on concentrations of PM
10
from
routinely available monitoring data. Results from the validation study show that STEMS-Air performs well in
predicting both daily (at four sites) and annual (at 30 sites) concentrations of PM
10
. For daily modelling,
STEMS-Air achieved r
2
values in the range 0.190.43 (pb0.001) based solely on trafc-related emissions and
r
2
values in the range 0.410.63 (pb0.001) when adding information on background levels of PM
10
. For
annual modelling of PM
10
, the model returned r
2
in the range 0.670.77 (Pb0.001) when compared with
monitored concentrations. The model can thus be used for rapid production of daily or annual city-wide air
pollution maps either as a screening process in urban air quality planning and management, or as the basis for
health risk assessment and epidemiological studies.
Crown Copyright 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Trafc is a major source of elevated levels of air pollution in many
European cities. In large urban areas, in particular, variations in trafc
ows and speeds, meteorology, land use, and terrain lead to complex
patterns of air pollution (Wilson and Zawar-Reza, 2006). As such, even
relatively dense networks of routine air pollution monitoring are often
not sufcient to capture the spatial and temporal patterns of air
pollution exposures. Reliance on air pollution monitoring alone can
thus result in exposure misclassication. As an alternative means,
modelling can be used to estimate concentrations of air pollutants at
potentially any number of locations in time and space (Bellander et al.,
2001; Brauer et al., 2003; Briggs et al., 2000; Nyberg et al., 2000).
Indeed, air pollution models coupled with geographical information
systems (GIS) are increasingly used to meet the needs of exposure
assessment in epidemiological studies (Morra et al., 2006, 2009;
Jensen et al., 2009). The type of model applied in these studies largely
depends on the averaging period used in the exposure assessment and
the availability of data to feed the models. Land use regression
techniques, for example, are commonly used for modelling long-term
(i.e. annual) exposures (Hoek et al., 2008) but are not well suited to
dealing with short-term(e.g. daily) modelling as they do not allowfor
the inuence of meteorology. Dispersion models on the other hand are
well suited to short-termexposure modelling and can theoretically be
used to model for any averaging period if sufcient information is
available on source emissions and meteorology. Nevertheless,
although many different dispersion models have been developed,
very few have the capability for detailed air pollution mapping over
large study areas and are therefore adequate for exposure assessment
studies. One of the few models to meet these needs is ADMS-Urban
(Carruthers et al., 2000). This borrows functionality fromESRI's ArcGIS
to produce high resolution maps of air pollution which can be directly
used in GIS-based exposure assessment. Similar functionality has been
achieved with the AERMOD(Kesarkar et al., 2007), DUSTRAN(Allwine
et al., 2006) and OSPM (Berkowicz et al., 2008) models. Despite these
developments, however, there remain three limiting factors in
applying these models to exposure studies: 1) they have hungry
data demands (e.g. detailed data on source emissions and boundary
layer meteorology), 2) they are often expensive (i.e. typically between
3 and 10k depending on the software and type of licence), and, most
importantly, and 3) they do not simultaneously deal with large
Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
Corresponding author at: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Imperial
College London, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, W2 1PG, UK. Tel.: +44 20 7594 5027.
E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Gulliver).
0048-9697/$ see front matter. Crown Copyright 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2011.03.004
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Science of the Total Environment
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ sci t ot env
numbers of emissionsources. Indeed, evenif data demands canbe met,
tens of model runs will usually be required to map air pollution at high
spatial resolution (i.e. b50 m) over a large urban area.
Improved methods are therefore needed for estimation of
exposures at individual level and over large study populations,
particularly for short-term (e.g. daily) exposure periods. This paper
presents a GIS-based dispersion model (STEMS-Air: Space Time
Exposure Modelling System Air pollution) that provides both a
means of simultaneously dealing with large numbers of emission
sources and mapping air pollution over large urban areas. The basic
framework for STEMS was rst introduced by Gulliver and Briggs
(2005) which previously relied on third-party, conventional disper-
sion models for estimating air pollution concentrations. STEMS-Air is
intended to embed into the wider STEMS framework. The dispersion
model in STEMS-Air is implemented via a moving-window approach
in ArcGIS with grid-based FOCALSUM routines. The grid-based
approach allows for very fast processing of large numbers of emission
sources and by using a ne grid (e.g. 1020 metre grid cells) ensures
no signicant loss of detail in the underlying emission source
geography. Although this functionality has been used in a handful of
environmental applications (Gerrard et al., 2001; Loh et al., 1996) it
has seen remarkably little use in air pollution modelling. Collins
(1998) probably represents the rst example of using FOCALSUM for
mapping air pollution. In a study in Hudderseld, UK, a distance-
weighting approach was used to sum the contributions of trafc-
related air pollution sources within a xed diameter kernel around
each receptor (i.e. grid cell). The model was validated for NO
2
(r
2
=0.67) using data from routine air pollution monitoring sites. In
one of the other few published examples, Loibl and Orthofer (2001)
used a similar approach to model NO
2
across Austria on a 250 metre
grid. Again models were seen to compare well with data on monitored
concentrations: 54% (72 sites) and 76% (101 sites) of predictions fell
within 15 g/m
3
and 25 g/m
3
of monitored concentrations,
respectively. To date, however, the use of FOCALSUM appears to be
limited to simple distance-weighted approaches. Vienneau et al.
(2009) used FOCALSUMin ArcGIS with a xed set of distance weights
to account for the inuence of emissions aroundeachreceptor (i.e. grid
cell receptor) to model concentrations of NO
2
across Europe on a 1 km
grid. This approach did not however take account of the inuence of
meteorology on pollutant dispersion. In this paper the basic approach
is extended to using a Gaussian dispersion model coupled with
FOCALSUMroutines. The paper describes the methods used to develop
the model in a GIS and related data sets, presents the results from a
validation study using routinely available monitoring data, and makes
observations on potential improvements to the approach for further
development work. The model is intended for predicting concentra-
tions averaged over periods of at least 1 day and is not aimed at
replicating the more advanced models that have been developed with
the capability of predicting hourly concentrations of different
pollutants.
2. Material and methods
2.1. Model development
STEMS-Air operates is two modes: short-term (daily) and long-
term (annual) to t with the requirements of many epidemiological
studies. The outputs from short-term mode can be averaged to longer
periods (e.g. weeks or months) outside the programme (e.g. in Excel).
STEMS-Air comprises four model components: 1) an emissions
model, 2) a meteorological pre-processor, 3) a GIS-based air pollution
dispersion model, and 4) a GIS-based exposure assessment tool. Fig. 1
shows the overall structure of STEMS-Air with input and ow of data.
There is also an optional component where data on background
monitored concentrations can be added from sites (e.g. rural) that are
not signicantly inuenced by local source emissions but represent
levels of regional and long-range (i.e. trans-boundary) particulate air
pollution Each of the mandatory model components and related data
is described, separately, below.
2.1.1. Emissions model
The emissions model applies standard DMRB emissions factors
(DEFRA, 2007) to trafc ows (volume and speed), by type of vehicle
(i.e. light or heavy), to produce emission rates (g/m/s) of a given
pollutant, for each road link. To account for time-varying trafc ows,
emission factor proles can be applied by hour of the day, and days of
the week, for specic road links or geographical areas. Where detailed
local emissions proles do not exist, a default set of emission factors
are provided that can apply to the whole road network. The (vector)
road geography is subsequently converted into one or more ne grids
(e.g. 10 or 20 metre grid cells) of emission rates (depending on the
availability of time- and space-varying emissions proles) for each
pollutant.
2.1.2. Meteorological pre-processor
Atmospheric conditions in the model are determined by applying
Pasquill (1961) stability categories. The modied Pasquill classica-
tion (Davies and Singh, 1985), as shown in Table 1, is essentially a
function of wind speed (generally measured at about 10 m above
ground) and incoming solar radiation. There are a number of other
schemes for assessing atmospheric conditions (Mohan and Siddiqui,
1998) but they require measurement of temperature and/or wind
speeds at two heights which are not routinely and freely available.
Incoming solar radiation is determined by the angle between the
sun's rays and the Earth's surface, commonly referred to as the zenith
angle (Z
N
), and the amount of cloud (oktas). Zenith angles vary
for any location on the Earth's surface by time of year and time of day
Fig. 1. STEMS-Air: model components and data ow.
Table 1
Modied Pasquill stability classes.
Davies and Singh, 1985.
Wind speed
(m/s)
Daytime incoming solar radiation
(W/m
2
)
Within 1 h
before sunset
or after
sunrise
Night-time
cloud amount
(oktas)
Strong
(N600)
Moderate
(300600)
Slight
(b300)
Overcast 03 47 8
2.0 A AB B C D FG F D
2.13.0 AB B C C D F E D
3.15.0 B BC C C D E D D
5.16.0 C CD D D D D D D
6.0 C D D D D D D D
2420 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
(i.e. hour angle) and can be found by Eq. (1) (Mohan and Siddiqui,
1998)
cosZ
N
= sin sin + cos cos cos 1
Where is the solar declination angle, is the latitude, and is the
hour angle.
Declination angle () is in the range 0.13 radians, or 23.4,
and can be found by Eq. (2) (Campbell and Norman, 1998).
sin = 0:39785

sin4:871 + 0:0172J + 0:03345

sin 6:2238 + 0:0175J

2
Where J is the calendar day (i.e. Julian day) with J =1 on 1st
January and J =365 on 31st December (or J =366 in a leap year).
The hour angle () is in the range 180and can be found by the
following formula (3):
cos = 0:0833 tt
sn
3
where t is the hour of the day and t
sn
is the time of the solar noon.
Finally, the amount of cloud cover is used to attenuate the solar
radiation calculated under clear sky conditions.
The meteorological pre-processor in STEMS-Air therefore uses
data on day of the year, hour of the day, wind speed (m/s), and cloud
cover to calculate, for each time period (e.g. hour), the likely incoming
solar radiation (Watts/m
2
) (N.B. The meteorological inputs required
are routinely monitored by national meteorological agencies (e.g.
Meteo-France, UK Met. Ofce) at a height of about 10 m above
ground). The urban sites in this study have weather sensors
positioned at about 5 m above ground. The resulting values for solar
radiation are used in conjunction with wind speed to determine the
stability classes, as shown in Table 1. A MET le is subsequently
produced and exported to the GIS containing day of the year, hour of
the day, wind speed, wind direction and stability class. Users can
alternatively import their own data, based on local measurement or
other models, if appropriate.
2.1.3. Air pollution dispersion model
The STEMS-Air pollution model is based on the standard solution
of a Gaussian model of dispersion at ground level (Williams, 1990;
Venkatram and Horst, 2006). Contributions to the pollutant concen-
tration from sources along the wind direction vector are found by
solving Eq. (4):
C x; y; z =
Q
U
z
exp
1
2
H

z
_ _
2
_ _
4
Contributions to pollutant concentrations from emission sources
that lie at an angle (N0) to the wind direction vector are found by
solving Eq. (5):
C x; y; z =
Q
U
y

z
exp
1
2
H

z
_ _
2
+
y

y
_ _
2
_ _
5
where C is the pollutant concentration at location x, y, and z, Q is the
emission source rate (g/m/s), U is the wind speed (m/s),
z
is the
standard deviation of the vertical concentration in the plume,
y
is the
standard deviation of the horizontal concentration in the plume, H is
the height of the release of the emissions (e.g. 1 m above ground for
ground-level sources), and Y is the distance along the normal from
emission source to the plume centreline.
The stability categories, determined in the meteorological pre-
processor, along with wind speed and wind direction, are used as the
basis for calculating the vertical (
z
) and horizontal (
y
) dispersion
parameters. These are applied using a formulation of the dispersion
curves from Briggs (1973) by Venkatram et al. (2005) and Venkatram
and Horst (2006) for application of short-range dispersion models in
urban areas. For unstable conditions (A and B stability classes) the
following parameters are applied:

z
= 0:24x 1 + 0:001x
1=2

y
=
0:32x
1 + 0:0004x
1=2
6
where x(m) is downwind distance from the source.
For neutral and stable conditions (C to G classes) the following
parameters are applied:

z
= 0:14x 1 + 0:0003x
1=2

z
= 0:16x 1 + 0:0004x
1=2
7
where x(m) is downwind distance from the source.
STEMS-Air implements the dispersions model with FOCALSUM
GRIDroutines programmedinArcGIS withArc Macro Language (AML).
This approach has two main advantages over traditional approaches
for line sources. Firstly, it overcomes the problem of having to derive
an analytical expression for the concentration that accounts for the
line source as a whole (Venkatram and Horst, 2006; Luhar and Patil,
1989). Secondly, grid-based routines are generally very fast GIS
operations and so large numbers of sources and receptors can
simultaneously be modelled to allow rapid production of city-wide
air pollution surfaces. This is of particular benet when city-wide
exposure assessment is needed for large numbers of individual days
(e.g. during air pollutionepisodes whichmay last for up to 10 days and
re-occur several times in 1 year).
Many conventional dispersion models would require a minimum
of between 25 and 100 model runs, depending on the number of
emission sources (e.g. road segments) and size of the study area, to
undertake city-wide exposure assessment. This may become very
time-consuming work, which requires expertise to tessellate the
emission sources into a manageable set of model runs. In most
models, simply applying a regular grid (e.g. 2 km resolution) over a
city to tessellate the emission sources would result in a very large
number of model runs (c. 150200 model runs in London).
Furthermore, many receptors (e.g. point locations of residential
addresses for exposure estimates) would have to be duplicated across
several model runs as they may lie on the boundary between the
zones used to tessellate the emission sources.
ArcGIS offers a number of options inFOCALSUMthat all automatically
create summary statistics (sum, mean, median, standard deviation) for
those cells falling within a range of different buffer sizes and window
shapes (e.g. circle, annulus, rectangle, wedge) around each central
processing cell [N.B. These are, in essence, pre-programmed DOCELL
operations]. FOCALSUMcan also deal with irregular shapes by providing
a kernel le with individually referenced cells.
STEMS-Air uses the FOCALSUM routine with the wedge option.
Contributions to air pollution concentrations from trafc sources are,
as standard, considered within a 300 metre buffer around each
receptor. In most cases the contributions from sources outside this
distance are sufciently small to be treated as background air
pollution within an urban area. Indeed, an analysis of the contribution
from trafc source emissions summed within different buffer sizes
(i.e. 100 metre concentric rings up to 1000 m) at various receptor
sites in London showed that the total contribution beyond 300 m was
b2% of predicted concentrations. In some situations, however, trafc
levels beyond 300 m are sufciently high (e.g. motorways) that the
buffer distance around a receptor needs to be extended. The user can
achieve this by adding an additional buffer (e.g. up to 500 m from
source) in the programme.
Prior to model development, regression analysis was used to
determine the optimum internal angle of the inner and outer wedges.
2421 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
A series of wedges at 5 degree intervals between 20 and 60 were
applied to the emissions grid using FOCALSUM, Wedges of 45 were
seen to provide best performance in predicting monitored
concentrations.
The procedure for implementing the programme in GRID is
illustrated in Fig. 2 as follows:
1. For each receptor, create a FOCALSUM wedge along the line of the
wind direction with an internal angle of 45 and a radius of 300 m.
Create two outer wedges adjacent to the inner wedge each with
internal angles of 45 and of radius 40 m. The purpose of the outer
wedges is to account for the relatively small contributions likely to
arise from neighbouring source cells that are positioned normal to
the wind direction.
2. Intersect a series of circular buffers at 20 metre intervals (i.e. to
match the resolution of the emissions grid and thus retain the
highest level of precision in the dispersion modelling) with the
wedges to create segments inside each wedge.
3. Using FOCALSUM, intersect each wedge and segment with the
source emissions geometry (i.e. gridded emissions).
4. Sum the emissions within each segment and then apply the
dispersion calculation, using Eq. (4) for the inner wedge and Eq. (5)
for the outer wedge. Finally sumthe contribution fromeach wedge
to provide a modelled PM
10
concentration at the receptor.
Ideally, separate calculations would be made between each
emission grid cell and receptor but this becomes a very protracted
process to implement when large numbers of cells are used and
particularly when the orientation (i.e. due to wind direction) of the
reference cells change in relation to the central processing cell. The
use of FOCALSUM is therefore somewhat of a compromise, but this
approach nonetheless remains relatively fast for dealing with large
numbers of emission sources.
2.1.4. Exposure assessment
Exposure assessment can be performed for a series of points (e.g.
residential address locations) by entering co-ordinates into the
model, or for areas (e.g. census tracts) by their intersection with
maps of air pollution from STEMS-Air. In grid mapping mode there is
no limitation to the spatial resolution of the grid but clearly processing
time will signicantly increase with ner spatial resolution (e.g.
10 m). Daily or annual estimates of exposure can be determined in
point or grid mapping modes. Resulting data can be exported as
standard delimited text les for further analysis (e.g. epidemiological
analysis or health assessment).
2.2. Model application
Modelling was carried out in London, UK, because data on road
geography and trafc ow/composition are readily available from the
London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (LAEI), and also there is a
relatively dense network of air pollution monitoring sites for model
validation. PM
10
was chosen as the reference pollutant because of the
strong body of epidemiological evidence linking particulates with
negative effects on health (Brunekreef and Holgate, 2002; Dockery
and Pope, 2006). STEMS-Air was implemented for both short-term
(i.e. daily) and long-term (i.e. annual) air pollution modelling. Short-
term modelling was undertaken for July to December 2007 as data on
co-located hourly trafc composition and speeds, meteorological data,
and air pollution monitoring were available during this period at a
number of sites. Long-term modelling was applied to 20012003 as
this period represented the best coverage of air pollution monitoring
sites (n=30) with complete data records across three consecutive
years.
2.2.1. Short-term modelling
Data from co-located trafc and air pollution monitoring at six
roadside/kerbside sites (from the London Air Quality Network) were
kindly provided by King's College London and used as the primary
basis for testing and validation of STEMS-Air in relation to short-term
(i.e. daily) modelling. The data covered 184 days between 1st July and
31st December 2007 and comprised hourly trafc composition for
different vehicle categories (i.e. car, motorcycles, buses, heavy goods
etc.), counts of the number of vehicles in each category by vehicle
speed in 10 km/h intervals, monitored concentrations of PM
10
, and
wind speed and wind direction frommeteorological data co-located at
some of the sites. Days related to unusual events (e.g. bonre week in
Fig. 2. STEMS-Air dispersion modelling procedure.
2422 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
November) and days with unusual trafc patterns (e.g. the Christmas
period from mid-December) were subsequently removed to leave a
total of 149 days of data.
Data were screened for completeness and reduced to the following
four sites that had good simultaneous coverage in trafc and
monitored concentrations of PM
10
: Brent 4 (BT4), Greenwhich 9
(GR9), Hackney 6 (HK6), and Tower Hamlets 4 (TH4). Fig. 3 shows a
map of the locations of these sites. All sites are located alongside busy
urban roads and in relatively clear suburban settings, with the
exception of HK6 which is in a street canyon with multi-storey
buildings. Also shownare the location andtype (i.e. kerbside, roadside,
urban background, suburban) of sites used in long-term modelling
(see below).
Data on road geography and trafc (on roads except those adjacent
to the trafc monitoring site) within a 300 metre buffer of each
monitoring sites were taken from the LAEI. The LAEI contains data on
annual average daily trafc (AADT) and composition (number of
light and heavy vehicles) for over 63,000 individual road links within
the Greater London Area. Each link also is attributed with a single,
average vehicle speed that applies to all vehicle categories. Road
geography is based on data from Ordnance Survey Master-Map and
has a ground precisionof b1 mand includes individual carriageways and
roundabouts.
The emissions model was run with separate emission factors for
different vehicle speeds and categories (i.e. light/heavy) on all roads
falling in a 300 metre circular buffer around each of the four
monitoring sites. Emissions were summed to provide total emission
rates of PM
10
on each road link. The time-varying trafc data from
each monitoring site was then analysed to provide weightings (i.e.
local emission proles in Fig. 1) for each hour of the day and day of
the week. As Fig. 4 shows, the emission proles vary both between site
in the magnitude of weights and in hour-to-hour pattern, but
generally the proles naturally fall into three groups: weekdays,
Saturdays, Sundays. The exception is at Hackney 6 which has a
different pattern of emissions during the evening period on Fridays.
The proles were assumed to be applicable to all other roads within
300 m of the trafc monitoring site as information on time-varying
factors for other roads in area surrounding each site was not available.
There was no information available for time-varying vehicles speeds,
so the long-term average speed at each site was applied to all hours
for all roads surrounding each site. Emission weights were subse-
quently applied to the baseline emissions data using the proles in
Fig. 4 to provide time-varying emission rates on all source emission
grids.
Co-located hourly data on wind speed and wind direction were
available with good coverage at all sites except for BT4 which was
substituted with data from TH4 the nearest similar site type.
Data on cloud cover from Heathrow Airport, which is the nearest
available site, were downloaded from the British Atmospheric Data
Centre (www.badc.ac.uk). These data were linked to the data on wind
speed and direction and entered into the meteorological pre-
processor to provide hourly data on atmospheric conditions in
STEMS-Air. STEMS-Air was then run for each of the four monitoring
sites to predict daily average concentrations of PM
10
(g/m
3
). The
model was run at 1-hour time resolution to account for the effects of
variability in meteorology on individual days (N.B. the concentration
based on 24 hourly values is not the same as meteorological variables
averaged over 1 day).
2.2.2. Long-term modelling
Data on monitored concentrations of annual average PM
10
between 2001 and 2003, for a total of 53 locations (including site
coordinates and site type), were downloaded from the website of The
London Air Quality Network (http://www.londonair.org). These years
covered a period when relatively minor intervention took place in
opening/closing of monitoring sites and thus provided a good basis for
year-to-year comparison between sites. A reduced list of sites were
subsequently produced (n=30) to include only those sites that
Fig. 3. Air pollution monitoring sites used in the validation study.
2423 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
passed the following criteria: data were available for at least 75% of
days within each year, data were denoted as fully ratied, and site
coordinates provided on the website could be veried or adjusted
using satellite imagery from Google Earth. These monitoring sites
were used as the basis for modelling annual average PM
10
from
STEMS-Air.
Data on trafc ows and composition were taken from the London
Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (LAEI) for each year corresponding
to the above-mentioned air pollution monitoring data. Average
emission rates were then computed in the emissions model for all
roads falling within 300 m of the 30 air pollution monitoring sites.
Data on hourly meteorological parameters (wind speed, wind
direction, cloud cover) were downloaded for Heathrow Airport
from BADC for the period 1st January 2001 to 31st December 2003.
These data were then entered into the meteorological pre-processor
to obtain data on atmospheric stability for each hour of each day.
The resulting data were then summarised as frequency data: the
number of occasions (e.g. hours during the year) on which the same
combination of meteorological variables were recorded (e.g. number
of hours during the year with frequency of wind direction of 30,
wind speed of 2 m/s, and cloud cover equals 8 oktas). This method
reduces the hourly data by about 8-fold to speed up the model
runs with no loss of information as the predictions for each line of
met data are averaged to provide an annual mean concentration in
long-term modelling. STEMS-Air was then run to model annual
mean concentrations of PM
10
for the 30 monitoring sites shown in
Fig. 3.
3. Results
Model validation was undertaken by comparing predicted PM
10
concentrations with monitored PM
10
concentrations at the sites
shown in Fig. 3. Model performance was assessed on the basis of the
validation analysis by computing adjusted r
2
, the root mean square
error (RMSE) and fractional bias (FB) dened for each site as:
FB =
C
p
C
o
_ _
0:5

C
p
+ C
o
_ _
where C
o
is the mean observed concentration and C
p
is the mean
predicted concentration.
3.1. Short-term modelling
Comparisons between monitored and predicted concentrations of
daily average PM
10
were made for the four sites shown in Fig. 3.
Summary statistics for model performance are shown in Table 2 and
scatterplots between monitored and predicted concentrations at each
site are shown in Fig. 5. Modelling was done for nearly all of the days
available for comparison with monitored concentrations except in the
case of GR9 where only 54 days of monitored concentrations were
available.
Fig. 4. Time-varying emission weights for daily air pollution modelling sites.
Table 2
Summary statistics for modelled daily trafc-related PM
10
(g/m
3
).
Site Adjusted r
2
RMSE FB N (days)
BT4 Brent 4 0.43 17.55 0.84 140
GR9 Greenwich 9 0.43 18.01 1.37 54
HK6 Hackney 6 0.19 17.85 1.06 143
TH4 Tower Hamlets 4 0.40 29.86 1.31 144
2424 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
As Table 2 shows, model performance is similar for BT4, GR9 and
TH4 with adjusted r
2
values of 0.43, 0.43, and 0.40 respectively
(pb0.001), with the site at HK6 having a lower r
2
of 0.19 (pb0.001).
The lower r
2
at HK6 can perhaps be explained by this site being
characterised by a continuous street canyon, the effects of which are
not considered in STEMS-Air. Values of RMSE and FB are relatively
high for all sites, as would be expected when only including the local,
trafc component. Values of FB lie in the range 0.84 to 1.37 a FB
value of 1.00 represents under-prediction by a factor of 3. For both
measures, results are weakest at TH4 with under-prediction by about
a factor of 4 and RMSE of 29.86 g/m
3
.
The results are based on comparisons made against monitored
PM
10
which includes all sources (e.g. trafc, secondary particulates,
wind-blownsoil anddust etc.), sointerms of the explainedvariationin
trafc-related PM
10
the model is likely performing relatively well.
Indeed, examination of the ratio of PM
10
concentrations between
those at rural, urban background and roadside sites (by the authors)
showed that, on average, local trafc-related emissions account for no
more than 1030% of monitored concentrations at urban background
locations, and 3050% at urban roadside locations: the remainder is
attributable to regional pollution, present at the remote rural sites. In
order to consider the inuence of regional background PM
10
here,
therefore, daily mean concentrations of PM
10
from rural monitoring
data were added to the modelled predictions from STEMS-Air. Rural
PM
10
concentrations were taken as the average of data from the only
two rural monitoring stations in the south east of England: Harwell
(70 km due west of central London), and Rochester (60 km east-
south-east of central London).
The results of combining modelled concentrations from the local
model of trafc and background concentrations are shown in Table 3
and Fig. 6. As can be seen, model performance variably improves (r
2
:
0.410.61, pb0.001) at all sites as a result of adding the data on rural
monitored concentrations. The largest improvement in terms of r
2
is at
HK6: r
2
=0.41. Values of RMSE and FB are, as would be expected,
lowered at all sites. RMSE is still high at TH4 (12.75 g/m
3
) compared
to the other sites (7.48 g/m
3
8.66 g/m
3
) but greatly reduced with
the addition of daily mean background PM
10
concentrations.
Including rural concentrations of PM
10
in STEMS-Air results in
signicant improvement in model performance.
3.2. Long-term modelling
Comparisons between predicted and monitored concentrations of
annual average PM
10
were made for the 30 sites with data available
between 2001 and 2003. Annual mean concentrations of background
air pollution were obtained from Harwell for each year and were
added to the modelled concentrations there were insufcient data
to consider the rural site at Rochester.
Table 4 shows the summary statistics for performance of STEMS-Air
with the addition of concentrations of background PM
10
.
As can be seen, models perform well in each year (r
2
: 0.670.77)
with the best result in terms of r
2
, RMSE and FB for 2001 (0.77, 3.32,
0.08, respectively). Results are weakest for 2003, especially in terms of
RMSE: 10.75 g/m
3
. It should be noted, however, that concentrations
were generally inated in 2003 compared to the other years due to a
number of air pollution episodes, with four periods of unusually high
Fig. 5. Scatter-plots of modelled (local trafc) versus monitored concentrations of PM
10
(g/m
3
), July to December 2007.
2425 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
PM
10
levels in south east England. August 2003, for example, saw a
period of 10 days when daily mean concentrations of PM
10
exceeded
50 g/m
3
(Stedman, 2004).
As demonstrated by the negative values of FB, the model under-
predicts in all years, but only very slightly in 2001 (FB=0.08).
Furthermore, there is over-predictionfor some, mostlybackgroundsites
in 2001. This is due to the rural concentrations being higher than levels
recorded at background sites in London, which likely come fromhigher
proportions of non-anthropogenic sources at the rural site.
To improve model performance, linear regression was used to
calibrate the model predictions to the monitored concentrations for
each year. Summary statistics for the calibrated models are show in
Table 5. Fractional bias is not included as zero mean bias is implied by
a linear regression. Fig. 7 shows scatterplots of modelled versus
monitored concentrations for the same data with sites classied as
either roadside (i.e. roadside/kerbside) or background (i.e. urban
background/suburban) based on the description of site types fromthe
national air quality archive (www.airquality.co.uk).
As Table 5 indeed shows, the calibrated model reduces RMSE to
between about one third and one half of the levels found from the un-
calibrated model (Table 4). Also noteworthy is that the constant (i.e.
background) fromthe regressionis broadly similar tothat of the average
concentration from the rural monitoring sites in 2001 (16.76 g/m
3
)
and 2002 (18.78 g/m
3
), but in 2003 the regression yields a background
value of 25.61 g/m
3
compared to the rural concentration of
20.31 g/m
3
at the rural site. Only three of the London sites had
monitored values lower than the constant fromthe regression for 2003.
The coefcients (i.e. slope) of the regression are 2.92, 3.92, and 5.79 for
2001, 2002 and 2003, respectively. Given the values of the constant in
the regression, and notwithstanding that some sources are not included
in the modelling (e.g. wind-blown soil and dust, and vehicle tyre and
brake wear), these values imply that STEMS-Air systematically under-
predicts annual concentrations of trafc-related PM
10
. It must be borne
in mind, however, that meteorological parameters were only available
Table 3
Summary statistics for modelled local, trafc-related and regional background PM
10
(g/m
3
).
Site Adjusted r
2
RMSE FB N (days)
BT4 Brent 4 0.61 7.54 0.16 140
GR9 Greenwich 9 0.58 8.66 0.22 54
HK6 Hackney 6 0.41 7.48 0.16 143
TH4 Tower Hamlets 4 0.53 12.75 0.19 144
Fig. 6. Scatter-plots of modelled (local trafc+rural) versus monitored concentrations of PM
10
(g/m
3)
, July to December 2007.
Table 4
Performance statistics for predictions of annual average of PM
10
(g/m
3
), 20012003.
Year Adjusted r
2
RMSE FB N (sites)
2001 0.77 3.32 0.08 30
2002 0.68 4.98 0.20 30
2003 0.67 10.75 0.37 30
2426 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
from Heathrow Airport which is relatively exposed compared to the
locations of the air pollution monitoring sites in London. The typically
higher levels of wind speed recorded at Heathrow Airport result in
smaller modelled concentrations from STEMS-Air. Moreover, this
magnitude of under-prediction was not seen at any of the sites in the
short-term modelling where meteorological parameters were more
representative of urban conditions. To look at this area in more detail,
the short-term modelling was done for a second time by substituting
wind speed at each of the four sites (BT4, GR9, HK6 and TH4) with wind
speed from the meteorological site at Heathrow. Over the 6-month
period from July to December 2007 average wind speeds at Heathrow
were approximately three times higher than those found at the urban
sites and resulting predictions of PM
10
were on average 67.5% lower
thanseenwhenusing local windspeed fromthe four sites. This suggests
that the coefcients of the regressionshowninTable 5might bereduced
by about three-fold if using wind speed from less exposed urban
locations.
Fig. 7 shows that STEMS-Air reasonably well explains the
magnitude of variation in the trafc contributions to concentrations
of PM
10
. There are some anomalies to this which may be due to the
exclusion of other, local (i.e. domestic, industrial) sources in the
model. As can be seen in Fig. 7, one site, Marylebone (kerbside), has
consistently higher concentrations than all other sites. Clearly this site
is inuential on the performance of the model in terms of r
2
. To look at
the effect of this site on overall model performance, values of r
2
were
obtained when excluding Marylebone from the analysis. As expected,
values of r
2
are reduced but the results were still seen to be good in all
years (r
2
: 0.560.67, pb0.001).
For comparative purposes, modelling was also undertaken with
ADMS-Urban (Carruthers et al., 2000), a proprietary dispersion model,
for the same validation data described above, replicating as much as
possible the inputs (i.e. emission rates and factors, meteorology) used
in STEMS-Air. ADMS-Urban was thus offered information on trafc
emissions (as vectors) within a 300-metre circular buffer of each
monitoring site, and data on background concentrations from the
same rural monitoring stations. Tables 6 and 7 show results of the
validation analysis for ADMS-Urban for short-term modelling and
long-termmodelling, respectively. ADMS-Urban did not produce data,
Table 5
Calibration models for predictions of annual average PM
10
(g/m
3
), 20012003.
Year a(x) Constant SEE RMSE N (sites)
2001 2.92 18.12 1.85 1.90 30
2002 3.92 18.04 2.19 2.34 30
2003 5.79 25.61 3.31 3.47 30
Fig. 7. Scatterplots of modelled versus monitored annual average PM
10
concentrations, 20012003.
2427 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
due to incomplete information on meteorology, for two of the days
modelled at BT4 and TH4 (see Table 6).
As shown in Table 6, in terms of r
2
the performance of ADMS-Urban
(r
2
: 0.300.54) is weaker than seen for STEMS-Air (r
2
: 0.410.61),
though nearly the same for GR9. Conversely, however, ADMS-Urban
performs marginally better than STEMS-Air in terms of RMSE and FB at
three out of four sites. Correlations between modelled and monitored
data and other measures of performance should, however, improve for
ADMS-Urban if more detailed data on meteorology (e.g. temperature,
rainfall, and air pressure), information on street canyons, and models
of terrain are offered. For long-termmodelling, as shown in Table 7, in
terms of r
2
ADMS-Urban (r
2
: 0.710.77) performs slightly better than
STEMS-Air (r
2
: 0.670.77) for two (2002 and 2003) out of the 3 years.
Values of RMSE and FB are broadly the same for the two models.
4. Discussion
The validation results presented suggest that STEMS-Air can be
applied to both short-term and long-term modelling of PM
10
.
Attempts to make comparisons between these results and those
from other studies are difcult, however, simply because particle
validation studies are not available for many models (Holmes and
Morawska, 2006). There are a few notable examples that have
evaluated the performance for dispersion models in predicting daily
average PM
10
. In a study in Christchurch, New Zealand, Wilson and
Zawar-Reza (2006), for example, compared predictions of daily
average PM
10
from TAPM (The Air Pollution Model) with monitored
PM
10
concentrations at 12 monitoring sites over 59 days during the
winter of 20032004. Results were reported in terms of RMSE and
correlation (r). Generally higher values of RMSE were seen than those
reported here, with 10 out of the 12 sites yielding values N30 g/m
3
,
though the range of monitored concentrations were similar to this
study. Correlations are not directly comparable but were broadly
weaker (mostly in the range r =0.40.5) than those seen in this study.
Gokhale and Raokhande (2008) compared results fromthree different
models (CALINE3, CAL3QHC, and M-GFLSM) against daily mean
concentrations of PM
10
and PM
2.5
at a single trafc site in the city of
Guwahati, India, over 4 months during the winter of 2005/2006. The
study reported fractional bias between 0.01 and 0.5 for the three
models. Again these results are broadly comparable with those
presented here when the background air pollution model is applied
(FB: 0.19 to 0.22).
Although dispersion modelling remains the only viable basis for
short-term modelling of air pollution exposures, for long-term (i.e.
annual) modelling there are a range of available techniques (Jerrett
et al., 2005). Of the more advanced techniques, land use regression
(LUR) modelling has been used widely in Europe and North America
(Hoek et al., 2008) for modelling annual mean concentrations of
particulates and NO
2
. In general, LUR models have been seen to
performwell with validation studies yielding r
2
values typically in the
range 0.5 to 0.7 (Hoek et al., 2008). The results for LUR models are
broadly similar to those obtained here, but STEMS-Air, apart from in
all likelihood still taking longer to produce modelled exposures, has
three distinct advantages over LUR models. Firstly, STEMS-Air is
transferable between study areas whereas LUR models, which tend to
be built with local source emissions data (e.g. trafc ows, road
geography, land use) and are calibrated to local air pollution
monitoring data, may not transfer well (Hoek et al., 2008). Secondly,
STEMS-Air can directly provide modelled concentrations that reect
the spatial effects of yearly patterns in meteorology, unlike LUR
models which have to rely on some temporally static emissions data
(e.g. land use) and can only be universally calibrated to monitoring
data for each year. Thirdly, STEMS-Air is directly based on emissions,
so can be used to estimate future concentrations (e.g. under different
policy scenarios), or to carry out hind-casts for past (different)
emission situations. Given these advantages, and with its simple
implementation and capacity for modelling city-wide air pollution,
STEMS-Air thus represents a useful alternative to LUR modelling in
long-term exposure assessment studies.
Although STEMS-Air was seen to generally perform well, it needs
to be recognised that it does not provide a substitute for formal
dispersion modelling where detailed data are needed for a small
number of locations and sources. Its role is essentially as a screening
model or mapping tool, when high resolution and time-varying
estimates of air pollution are needed across large study areas or
populations. A number of potential improvements could nevertheless
be made to address some of the inherent weaknesses in the current
model formulation. Firstly, the current version of the model does not
consider local, non-trafc sources (i.e. domestic, industrial). In the UK,
estimated annual emissions fromthese sources are routinely available
on a 1 km grid (e.g. National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory), with
explicit point locations for large industrial sources (e.g. stacks). For
area sources (e.g. 1 kmgrids) it would be possible add a box model to
STEMS-Air similar to those included in other dispersion models such
as ADMS; for point sources emissions, an adaptation of the general
Gaussian dispersion model cited above could be made to account for
source height. A second improvement would be the addition of a
simple street canyon model, such as the one described by European
Environment Agency at http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/
TEC11a/page014.html. A canyon model would require data on, or a
surrogate for, building heights which have traditionally been difcult
to obtain/derive. From 2009, however, Light Detection and Ranging
Data (LIDAR) (Cici et al., 2009) from which building heights can be
derived will be freely available (for research purposes) in the UK for
large conurbations. LIDAR could theoretically be used to provide data
on streets with canyons of continuous and signicant height. The data
could directly be added into STEMS-Air via a second grid to act as a
reference to where a canyon model should be applied. The
meteorological sub-model used in STEMS-Air is also relatively simple,
and does not make use of the more advanced algorithms that have
become available in recent years (e.g. to describe boundary layer
conditions). Enhancement of this component would be possible, but
at the expense of increasing data demands. Finally, further work
should include modelling and validation of range of pollutants which
might be required for air quality management and exposure
assessment, including key urban pollutants such as NO
2
and CO.
5. Conclusions
A GIS-based air pollution dispersion model has been developed and
applied in London for daily and annual modelling of PM
10
. In broad
terms, the model was seen to produce good predictions of monitored
concentrations for different time periods and in at different locations. A
Table 6
Summary statistics for modelled local, trafc-related and regional background PM
10
(g/m
3
) from ADMS-Urban.
Site Adjusted r
2
RMSE FB N (days)
BT4 Brent 4 0.46 6.94 0.06 138
GR9 Greenwich 9 0.54 8.37 0.15 54
HK6 Hackney 6 0.30 6.60 0.07 143
TH4 Tower Hamlets 4 0.34 15.73 0.31 142
Table 7
Performance statistics for predictions of annual average of PM
10
(g/m
3
) from ADMS-
Urban, 20012003.
Year Adjusted r
2
RMSE FB N (sites)
2001 0.77 5.04 0.20 30
2002 0.71 3.81 0.10 30
2003 0.73 11.06 0.38 30
2428 J. Gulliver, D. Briggs / Science of the Total Environment 409 (2011) 24192429
number of improvements to the model and directions for future work
have been cited. The result of the study is a simple dispersion model and
exposure assessment tool that can be implemented for screening and
mapping purposes by lay users. Incorporation of the ArcGIS FOCALSUM
routine, at the heart of the model, allows relatively quick production of
high resolution, city-wide air pollution maps. The maps and exposure
assessment tool could be applied in epidemiological studies and health
risk assessment lookingat links betweenair pollutionandhumanhealth
over daily or longer-term (e.g. annual) periods.
Acknowledgements
The research presented here was initially developed as part of the
EU 5th Framework Programme on Health Effects and Risks of
Transport Systems (HEARTS), led by the World Health Organisation
(Rome), with further development taking place as part of the EU 7th
Framework Programme on GENeric European Sustainable Informa-
tion Space for environment (GENESIS). The authors wish to thank
King's College London for providing data on trafc ows and speeds
and meteorology from six roadside air pollution monitoring sites in
London.
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