Spatial representativeness of an air quality monitoring station. Application to NO2 in urban areas

The present study aims at setting up a geostatistical methodology that could be implemented in an operational context to assess the spatial representativeness of a measurement station. In the proposed definition, a point is considered as belonging to the area of representativeness of a station if its concentration differs from the station measurement by less than a given threshold. Additional criteria related to distance or environmental characteristics may also be introduced. Concentrations are first estimated at each point of the domain applying kriging techniques to passive sampling data obtained from measurement surveys. The standard deviation of the estimation error is then used, making a hypothesis on the error distribution, to select the points, at a fixed risk, where the difference of concentration with respect to the station is below the threshold. The methodology is then applied to NO2 experimental datasets for different French cities.