Abstract
The provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia are major oil- and gas-producing regions in western Canada. With increasing oil and gas production activities, there has been a growing concern of the effect of oil and gas industry emissions on health. Nevertheless, lack of proper tools to estimate the exposure to these emissions has been a hindrance to epidemiological studies and risk assessment. This paper presents a spatiotemporal modeling approach to estimating ambient sulfur dioxide (SO2) levels based on environmental monitoring data (N = 10,295), which were collected at rural sites (591 per month on average) of this region from June 1, 2001 to May 31, 2002. Based on the model, illustrative maps consistently revealed high and low SO2 concentration sub-regions. The sub-regions with elevated SO2 concentrations had increased levels during the winter months from December 2001 to March 2002 and then decreased during the spring of 2002. This statistical modeling approach may help researchers estimate the SO2 levels within the study area for their epidemiological studies or risk assessment.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is part of the M.Sc. thesis of Shihe Fan, who received partial financial support from grants to A. Senthilselvan. The authors would like to thank The Western Interprovincial Scientific Studies Association for providing the SO2 data. Igor Burstyn was supported by salary awards from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (population health investigator).
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Appendix
Appendix
Assume that our interest is to predict SO2 for August 2001 at the point S = (s 1, s 2). From the Eq. 4a, the predicted value of log-transformed SO2 concentration (\(\hat Y_{\left( {s,t} \right)} \)) at S at time t = 3 becomes
where \({\mathop x\limits^ \wedge }_{{_{1} }} ,{\mathop x\limits^ \wedge }_{{_{2} }} ,...{\text{ }}{\mathop x\limits^ \wedge }_{{_{{64}} }}\) correspond to the latent variables at the supporting sites as exemplified in the fourth column of Table 4 for August 2001 (t = 3) with all 64 elements, \(\hat \mu _3 {\text{ = 0}}{\text{.03}}\) (mean for August 2001 (t = 3) taken from Table 2), and \(\hat k_{_1 } ,\hat k_{_2 } , \ldots ,{\text{and}}\,\hat k_{_{64} } \) correspond to the kernel elements, which are a function of the distance from each supporting site ω 1, ω 2,…,ω 64 (defined in the manuscript) to the point S = (s 1, s 2)
For example, \(\hat k_{_1 } \)is a bivariate Gaussian kernel function with mean 0 and standard deviation 200 km (determined from semivariograms in the manuscript) and is given by the equation
where d 1 is the Euclidian distance from the point S = (s 1, s 2) to the supporting site ω 1 = (ω 11, ω 12)
The concentration of SO2 at the point S for August 2001 will be equal to \(e^{\hat Y_{\left( {s,3} \right)} } \).
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Fan, S., Burstyn, I. & Senthilselvan, A. Spatiotemporal Modeling of Ambient Sulfur Dioxide Concentrations in Rural Western Canada. Environ Model Assess 15, 137–146 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10666-008-9184-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10666-008-9184-0