Combining Land-Use Regression and Chemical Transport Modeling in a Spatiotemporal Geostatistical Model for Ozone and PM_2.5

Assessments of long-term air pollution exposure in population studies have commonly employed land-use regression (LUR) or chemical transport modeling (CTM) techniques. Attempts to incorporate both approaches in one modeling framework are challenging. We present a novel geostatistical modeling framework, incorporating CTM predictions into a spatiotemporal LUR model with spatial smoothing to estimate spatiotemporal variability of ozone (O₃) and particulate matter with diameter less than 2.5 μm (PM_2.5) from 2000 to 2008 in the Los Angeles Basin. The observations include over 9 years data from more than 20 routine monitoring sites and specific monitoring data at over 100 locations to provide more comprehensive spatial coverage of air pollutants. Our composite modeling approach outperforms separate CTM and LUR models in terms of root-mean-square error (RMSE) assessed by 10-fold cross-validation in both temporal and spatial dimensions, with larger improvement in the accuracy of predictions for O₃ (RMSE [ppb] for CTM, 6.6; LUR, 4.6; composite, 3.6) than for PM_2.5 (RMSE [μg/m³] CTM: 13.7, LUR: 3.2, composite: 3.1). Our study highlights the opportunity for future exposure assessment to make use of readily available spatiotemporal modeling methods and auxiliary gridded data that takes chemical reaction processes into account to improve the accuracy of predictions in a single spatiotemporal modeling framework.