Estimation of spatial patterns of urban air pollution over a 4-week period from repeated 5-min measurements Citation for published version: Gillespie, J, Masey, N, Heal, MR, Hamilton, S & Beverland, IJ 2017, 'Estimation of spatial patterns of urban air pollution over a 4-week period from repeated 5-min measurements' Atmospheric Environment, vol 150, pp. 295-302. a b s t r a c t Determination of intra-urban spatial variations in air pollutant concentrations for exposure assessment requires

more »

... ntial time and monitoring equipment. The objective of this study was to establish if shortduration measurements of air pollutants can be used to estimate longer-term pollutant concentrations. We compared 5-min measurements of black carbon (BC) and particle number (PN) concentrations made once per week on 5 occasions, with 4 consecutive 1-week average nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) concentrations at 18 locations at a range of distances from busy roads in Glasgow, UK. 5-min BC and PN measurements (averaged over the two 5-min periods at the start and end of a week) explained 40e80%, and 7e64% respectively, of spatial variation in the intervening 1-week NO 2 concentrations for individual weeks. Adjustment for variations in background concentrations increased the percentage of explained variation in the bivariate relationship between the full set of NO 2 and BC measurements over the 4-week period from 28% to 50% prior to averaging of repeat measurements. The averages of five 5-min BC and PN measurements made over 5 weeks explained 75% and 33% respectively of the variation in average 1week NO 2 concentrations over the same period. The relatively high explained variation observed between BC and NO 2 measured on different time scales suggests that, with appropriate steps to correct or average out temporal variations, repeated short-term measurements can be used to provide useful information on longer-term spatial patterns for these traffic-related pollutants.