New publication on air quality in Barcelona!

A team of researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health has developed and compared three types of models—Land Use Regression (LUR), Dispersion (DM), and a Hybrid model (HM)—to estimate outdoor pollutant concentrations in the city of Barcelona. The study focused on measuring the levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), black carbon (BC) and some PM2.5 constituents (Fe, Cu, Zn) in search of more accurate methods to assess the health effects of pollution.

During the study, two monitoring campaigns were carried out at different points in the city, measuring the concentration of NO2 at 984 residential addresses, and then the levels of NO2, PM2.5, and BC at 34 key locations. The three models were evaluated for their accuracy and performance through cross-validation and the use of monitoring stations.

The results showed that the models varied significantly in their ability to predict pollutant concentrations. […]