MOBILE ATMOSPHERIC SENSING

Abstract. Atmospheric quality dramatically deteriorates over the past decades around themetropolitan areas of China. Due to the coal combustion, industrial air pollution, vehicle waste emission, etc., the public health suffers from exposure to such air pollution as fine particles of particulates, sulfur and carbon dioxide, etc. Many meteorological stations have been built to monitor the condition of air quality over the city. However, they are installed at fixed sites and cover quite a small region. The monitoring results of these stations usually do NOT coincide with the public perception of the air quality. This paper is motivated to mimic the human breathing along the citys transportation network by the mobile sensing vehicle of atmospheric quality. To obtain the quantitative perception of air quality, the Environmental Monitoring Vehicle of Wuhan University (EMV-WHU) has been developed to automatically collect the data of air pollutants. The EMV-WHU is equipped with GPS/IMU, sensors of PM2.5, carbon dioxide, anemometer, temperature, humidity, noise, and illumination, as well as the visual and infrared camera. All the devices and sensors are well collaborated with the customized synchronization mechanism. Each sort of atmospheric data is accompanied with the uniform spatial and temporal label of high precision. Different spatial and data-mining techniques, such as spatial correlation analysis, logistic regression, spatial clustering, are employed to provide the periodic report of the roadside air quality. With the EMV-WHU, constant collection of the atmospheric data along the Luoyu Road of Wuhan city has been conducted at the daily peak and non-peak time for half a year. Experimental results demonstrated that the EMV is very efficient and accurate for the perception of air quality. Comparative findings with the meteorological stations also show the intelligence of big data analysis and mining of all sorts of EMV measurement of air quality. It is promising for the aerial and emergent air quality monitoring over the sky of big cities, if EMV-WHU be miniaturized for the unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV) in the future.