Found 9989 publications. Showing page 19 of 400:
Data fusion for enhancing urban air quality modeling using large-scale citizen science data
Rapid urbanization has led to many environmental issues, including poor air quality. With urbanization set to continue, there is an urgent need to mitigate air pollution and minimize its adverse health impacts. This study aims to advance urban air quality management by integrating a dispersion model output with large-scale citizen science data, collected over a 4-week period by 642 participants in Cork City, Ireland. The dispersion model enabled the identification of major sources of NO2 air pollution while also addressing gaps in regulatory monitoring efforts. Integrating the diffusion tube data with the dispersion model output, we developed a data fusion model that captured localized fluctuations in air quality, with increases of up to 22μg/m3 observed at major road intersections. The data fusion model provided a more accurate representation of NO2 concentrations, with estimates within 1.3μg/m3 of the regulatory monitoring measurement at an urban traffic location, an improvement of 11.7μg/m3 from the priori dispersion model. This enhanced accuracy enabled a more precise assessment of the population exposure to air pollution. The data fusion model showed a higher population exposure to NO2 compared to the dispersion model, providing valuable insights that can inform environmental health policies aimed at safeguarding public health.
2024
Two-Stage Feature Engineering to Predict Air Pollutants in Urban Areas
Air pollution is a global challenge to human health and the ecological environment. Identifying the relationship among pollutants, their fundamental sources and detrimental effects on health and mental well-being is critical in order to implement appropriate countermeasures. The way forward to address this issue and assess air quality is through accurate air pollution prediction. Such prediction can subsequently assist governing bodies in making prompt, evidence-based decisions and prevent further harm to our urban environment, public health, and climate, all of which co-benefit our economy. In this study, the main objective is to explore the strength of features and proposed a two stage feature engineering approach, which fuses the advantage of influential factors along with the decomposition approach and generates an optimum feature combination for five major pollutants including Nitrogen Dioxide (NO 2 ), Ozone (O 3 ), Sulphur Dioxide (SO 2 ), and Particulate Matter (PM2.5, and PM10). The experiments are conducted using a dataset from 2015 to 2020 which is publicly available and is collected from Belfast-based air quality monitoring stations in Northern Ireland, UK. In stage-1, using the dataset new features such as trigonometric and statistical features are created to capture their dependency on the target pollutant and generated correlation-inspired best feature combinations to improve forecasting model performance. This is further enhanced in stage-2 by an optimum feature combination which is an integration of stage-1 and Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) based features. This study employed a simplified Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural network and proposed a single-step forecasting model to predict multivariate time series data. Three performance indicators are used to evaluate the effectiveness of forecasting model: (a) root mean square error (RMSE), (b) mean absolute error (MAE), and (c) R-squared (R 2 ). The results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach with 13% improvement in performance (in terms of R 2 ) and the lowest error scores for both RMSE and MAE.
2024
Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Servicice
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SuperDARN Radar Wind Observations of Eastward-Propagating Planetary Waves
An array of SuperDARN meteor radars at northern high latitudes was used to investigate the sources and characteristics of eastward-propagating planetary waves (EPWs) at 95 km, with a focus on wintertime. The nine radars provided the daily mean meridional winds and their anomalies over 180 degrees of longitude, and these anomalies were separated into eastward and westward waves using a fast Fourier transform (FFT) method to extract the planetary wave components of zonal wavenumbers 1 and 2. Years when a sudden stratospheric warming event with an elevated stratopause (ES-SSW) occurred during the winter were contrasted with years without such events and composited through superposed epoch analysis. The results show that EPWs are a ubiquitous—and unexpected—feature of meridional wind variability near 95 km. Present even in non-ES-SSW years, they display a regular annual cycle peaking in January or February, depending on the zonal wavenumber. In years when an ES-SSW occurred, the EPWs were highly variable but enhanced before and after the onset.
2024
Monitoring air quality in ports and nearby cities is crucial to understanding the role of emissions from shipping and other port activities. This report analyzes air quality in 23 European ports, revealing limited observations in and around port areas. Only 5 of the 23 ports had at least one air quality sampling point for NO2 and PM10 inside the port area. Concentrations in nearby cities can be up to double (NO2) and 74% higher (PM10) when the wind comes from the port. EEA air quality maps showed higher annual mean NO2 concentrations in port areas compared to surrounding regions, with some ports exceeding the 2030 limit value of 20 µg/m³. Annual mean PM10 concentrations were also higher in port areas, with nine ports exceeding the new limit value. The limited number of sampling points makes it challenging to assess trends in NO2 and PM10 concentrations. International shipping emissions significantly contribute to NO2 levels in port cities, as shown by pollution episodes in Antwerpen and Barcelona.
ETC/HE
2024
2024
Extracellular Vesicles as Next-Generation Diagnostics and Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) hold great promise for clinical application as new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. This paper describes major GMP-based upstream and downstream manufacturing processes for EV large-scale production, also focusing on post-processing technologies such as surface bioengineering and uploading studies to yield novel EV-based diagnostics and advanced therapy medicinal products. This paper also focuses on the quality, safety, and efficacy issues of the bioengineered EV drug candidates before first-in-human studies. Because clinical trials involving extracellular vesicles are on the global rise, this paper encompasses different clinical studies registered on clinical-trial register platforms, with varying levels of advancement, highlighting the growing interest in EV-related clinical programs. Navigating the regulatory affairs of EVs poses real challenges, and obtaining marketing authorization for EV-based medicines remains complex due to the lack of specific regulatory guidelines for such novel products. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art regulatory knowledge to date on EV-based diagnostics and medicinal products, highlighting further research and global regulatory needs for the safe and reliable implementation of bioengineered EVs as diagnostic and therapeutic tools in clinical settings. Post-marketing pharmacovigilance for EV-based medicinal products is also presented, mainly addressing such topics as risk assessment and risk management.
2024
2024
The report provides the annual update of the European air quality concentration maps and population and vegetation exposure estimates for human health related indicators of pollutants PM10 (annual average, 90.4 percentile of daily means), PM2.5 (annual average), ozone (93.2 percentile of maximum daily 8-hour means, peak season average of maximum daily 8-hour means, SOMO35, SOMO10), NO2 (annual average) and benzo(a)pyrene (annual average), and vegetation related ozone indicators (AOT40 for vegetation and for forests) for the year 2022. The report contains also maps of Phytotoxic ozone dose (PODY) for selected crops (wheat, potato and tomato) and trees (spruce and beech) and NOx annual average map for the same year 2022. The ozone map of peak season average of maximum daily 8-hour means is presented for the first time. The trends in exposure estimates in the period 2005–2022 are summarized. The analysis for 2022 is based on the interpolation of the annual statistics of the 2022 observational data reported by the EEA member and cooperating countries and other voluntary reporting countries and stored in the Air Quality e-reporting database, complemented, when needed, with measurements from additional sources. The mapping method is the Regression – Interpolation – Merging Mapping (RIMM). It combines monitoring data, chemical transport model results and other supplementary data using linear regression model followed by kriging of its residuals (residual kriging). The paper presents the mapping results and gives an uncertainty analysis of the interpolated maps. It also presents concentration change in 2022 in comparison to the five-year average 2017-2021 using the difference maps and exposure estimates.
ETC/HE
2024
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