Air Quality and Health Predictions

Dear Colleagues,

Exposure to ambient air pollution is associated with a wide array of adverse health outcomes: From chronic bronchitis to myocardial infarctions, from low birth weight to premature mortality. Studies suggest that air pollution is one of the largest environmental health risks and a leading factor for burden of disease. In the past, we primarily relied on limited ground-level observations of certain pollutant concentrations from sparse networks to estimate exposures. Recent advances in both measurement and modelling technologies are providing new opportunities for developing high-resolution spatiotemporal fields for more pollutants. Exposures can be estimated much more accurately due to these high-resolution pollutant fields and even individualized by using geolocation technologies that allow the tracking of people in real time. These developments have major implications for public health tracking/surveillance and health impact assessment purposes. Air quality and public health scientists around the globe are striving to find novel ways to best use available data and technologies. The plethora of new approaches being proposed for estimating exposures requires comparative evaluations to determine best approaches while setting new directions for the future of exposure science.

This Special Issue focuses on the state-of-the-science in the prediction of air quality, exposure, and health impacts, including:

• Air quality model development and applications geared towards generating high resolution pollutant concentration fields;
• Novel uses of satellite observations in predicting ground-level concentrations;
• Field studies using low-cost sensors to build dense air pollutant observation networks;
• Data fusion methods that bring together modelled and observed data to take advantage of their best characteristics;
• Comparative evaluations of different approaches to estimating exposures and predicting health impacts;
• Short and medium range forecasts of air quality, exposures, and burdens of disease;
• Wildfire and prescribed fire smoke impacts;
• Health impact assessments based on novel approaches to predicting air quality

Dr. M. Talat Odman
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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