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Characterizing air pollution patterns on multiple time scales in urban areas: a landscape ecological approach

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Abstract

Quantifying the spatiotemporal patterns of air pollution in urban areas is essential for studying ecological processes, environmental quality, and human health in cities. To adequately characterize or monitor air pollution patterns, one important issue is scale because the concentrations of air pollutants are temporally dynamic and spatially heterogeneous. Our research addresses the scale issue in air quality monitoring and analysis by considering the following research questions: (1) How does the spatial pattern of ozone change with the temporal scale of analysis? (2) How does the spatial pattern of PM10 change with the temporal scale of analysis? (3) What implications do these scale effects have for designing and evaluating air pollution monitoring networks? We systematically examined these questions based on data from official air pollution monitoring networks in the Phoenix metropolitan region, Arizona, USA. Our results showed that spatial patterns of both ozone and PM10 may change substantially with the temporal scale of analysis. Ozone patterns at broader (but not finer) temporal scales were more consistent across years, and exhibited a more uniform, regionalized pattern. PM10 patterns were less consistent across years than ozone, and exhibited a more localized effect. Spatial patterns of PM10 also varied seasonally. Our study demonstrates that it is critically important to consider the temporal and spatial scales in designing or evaluating air monitoring networks in particular and in conducting air pollution research in general.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Landscape Ecology and Sustainability Laboratory (LESL) at Arizona State University for their suggestions on this study. We also thank Zhengjun Wang for his assistance with the GS + software and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments which helped improve the quality of the paper. JW’s research in urban ecology has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant no. BCS-1026865 (CAP3), DEB-0423704 (CAP2), and DEB-9714833 (CAP1) for the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP-LTER).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Ronald Pope

  2. Maricopa County Air Quality Department, Phoenix, AZ, 85007, USA

    Ronald Pope

  3. School of Life Sciences and Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Jianguo Wu

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  1. Ronald Pope
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Correspondence to Ronald Pope.

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Pope, R., Wu, J. Characterizing air pollution patterns on multiple time scales in urban areas: a landscape ecological approach. Urban Ecosyst 17, 855–874 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-014-0357-0

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