Daily Concentrations of PM<sub>2.5</sub> in the Valencian Community Using Random Forest for the Period 2008–2018
Soledad Natacha Represa,
Jesús Palomar-Vázquez,
Andrés Porta,
Alfonso Fernández-Sarría
Affiliations
Soledad Natacha Represa
Centro de Investigaciones del Medioambiente, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, La Plata 1900, Argentina
Jesús Palomar-Vázquez
Geo-Environmental Cartography and Remote Sensing Group, Department of Cartographic Engineering, Geodesy and Photogrammetry, Universitat Politècnica de València, València 46022, Spain
Andrés Porta
Centro de Investigaciones del Medioambiente, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, La Plata 1900, Argentina
Alfonso Fernández-Sarría
Geo-Environmental Cartography and Remote Sensing Group, Department of Cartographic Engineering, Geodesy and Photogrammetry, Universitat Politècnica de València, València 46022, Spain
Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a global problem that affects the population health and contributes to climate change. Remote sensing provides useful information for the development of air quality models. This work aims to obtain a daily model of PM2.5 levels in the Valencian Community with a resolution of 1 km for the period 2008−2018. MODIS-MAIAC images, meteorological parameters of the MERRA-2 project, land cover information and ground level measurements of PM2.5 levels were analysed with Random Forest. The verification of the model was carried out using cross-validation repeated ten times, and an evaluation of a test set with 20% of the collected information. The final model was used to generate maps of the daily concentrations of PM2.5 for the area of the Valencian Community throughout the study period.
