REDUNDANT MEASUREMENTS OF URBAN AIR MONITORING NETWORKS IN AIR-QUALITY REPORTING

This paper describes a statistical method to assess site redundancy of urban air monitoring networks in reporting daily Pollutant Standards Index (PSI), average concentrations, and the number of exceedances. Su ch a statistical method has identified significant redundancy in monit oring sites for one-year measurements of two air monitoring networks i n Taiwan. There are five redundant sites out of 15 monitoring sites in the Taipei area and eight redundant sites out of 18 monitoring sites in the Kaohsiung area. By using the statistical method presented in th is paper to downsize the monitoring networks, we can determine not onl y the number of redundant sites but also the priority of site removals . The derived sub-networks can maintain consistency in reporting air q uality without significant changes in the spatial variations of air me asurements for an existing air monitoring network.