A synchronized estimation of hourly surface concentrations of six criteria air pollutants with GEMS data

Abstract

Machine learning is widely used to infer ground-level concentrations of air pollutants from satellite observations. However, a single pollutant is commonly targeted in previous explorations, which would lead to duplication of efforts and ignoration of interactions considering the interactive nature of air pollutants and their common influencing factors. We aim to build a unified model to offer a synchronized estimation of ground-level air pollution levels. We constructed a multi-output random forest (MORF) model and achieved simultaneous estimation of hourly concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, O-3, NO2, CO, and SO2 in China, benefiting from the world's first geostationary air-quality monitoring instrument Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer. MORF yielded a high accuracy with cross-validated R-2 reaching 0.94. Meanwhile, model efficiency was significantly improved compared to single-output models. Based on retrieved results, the spatial distributions, seasonality, and diurnal variations of six air pollutants were analyzed and two typical pollution events were tracked.