Forecasting Extreme PM10 Concentrations Using Artificial Neural Networks
Nejadkoorki, F.1*and Baroutian, S.2
Life style and life expectancy of inhabitants have been affected by the increase of particulate
matter 10 micrometers or less in diameter (PM10) in cities and this is why maximum PM10 concentrations have
received extensive attention. An early notice system for PM10 concentrations necessitates an accurate forecasting
of the pollutant. In the current study an Artificial Neural Network was used to estimate maximum PM10
concentrations 24-h ahead in Tehran. Meteorological and gaseous pollutants from different air quality monitoring
stations and meteorological sites were input into the model. Feed-forward back propagation neural network
was applied with the hyperbolic tangent sigmoid activation function and the Levenberg–Marquardt optimization
method. Results revealed that forecasting PM10 in all sites appeared to be promising with an index of agreement
of up to 0.83. It was also demonstrated that Artificial Neural Networks can prioritize and rank the performance
of individual monitoring sites in the air quality monitoring network.
A neural network based model was proposed to
predict the daily averaged PM10 concentrations in the
metropolitan area of Tehran. The approach is to define
an alarm system for spatial and temporal pollution
information to provide choice for commuters to reduce
their unnecessary trips in contaminated areas across
the city. While most of researches have focused on
using meteorological variables this work has considered
gaseous pollutants as well to predict maximum PM10
one day before. Results showed that the
aforementioned variables significantly predicted PM10
concentrations. Another conclusion is that the
developed NNs for each monitoring site in an air quality
monitoring network could offset any missing data in
their neighbouring monitoring sites to a certain extent.
This provides air quality managers and researchers to
rank and prioritize the performance of air quality
monitoring sites. The significance of such technique
is that it can use data from different time scales.