Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-25-2016
Publication Title
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
DOI
10.3390/ijerph13080749
ISSN
1660-4601
Abstract
Appropriate spatiotemporal interpolation is critical to the assessment of relationships between environmental exposures and health outcomes. A powerful assessment of human exposure to environmental agents would incorporate spatial and temporal dimensions simultaneously. This paper compares shape function (SF)-based and inverse distance weighting (IDW)-based spatiotemporal interpolation methods on a data set of PM2.5 data in the contiguous U.S. Particle pollution, also known as particulate matter (PM), is composed of microscopic solids or liquid droplets that are so small that they can get deep into the lungs and cause serious health problems. PM2.5 refers to particles with a mean aerodynamic diameter less than or equal to 2.5 micrometers. Based on the error statistics results of k-fold cross validation, the SF-based method performed better overall than the IDW-based method. The interpolation results generated by the SF-based method are combined with population data to estimate the population exposure to PM2.5 in the contiguous U.S. We investigated the seasonal variations, identified areas where annual and daily PM2.5 were above the standards, and calculated the population size in these areas. Finally, a web application is developed to interpolate and visualize in real time the spatiotemporal variation of ambient air pollution across the contiguous U.S. using air pollution data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s AirNow program.
Recommended Citation
Li, Lixin, Xiaolu Zhou, Marc Kalo, Reinhard E. Piltner.
2016.
"Spatiotemporal Interpolation Methods for the Application of Estimating Population Exposure to Fine Particulate Matter in the Contiguous U.S. and a Real-Time Web Application."
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13 (8): 1-20.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph13080749
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/math-sci-facpubs/613
Comments
© 2016 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0). This article was retrieved from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.