Page 378 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 3

STS551 Yousif Alyousifi et al.
2. Study Area and Dataset
2.1 Study Areas
In this study, the hourly data for the period of three years, i.e. 2012 to 2014,
is collected from seven air-monitoring stations which are located in areas in
the central region of Peninsular Malaysia, as provided by the Department of
Environment (DOE). Areas considered for the study are Kuala Lumpur, Klang,
Cheras, Petaling Jaya, Banting, Shah Alam and Kuala Selangor. Modelling the
behaviour of air pollution and determine the risk of unhealthy states of air
pollution are the main interest of this study. Figure 1 shows the location of
seven areas involved in this study.
The dataset used in this study included the hourly API data from 1st January
2012 until 31st December 2014. The locations of the study areas that provide
the air quality monitoring stations for this research are shown in Figure 1.

3. Methodology
3.1 Air Pollution Index (API)
The air pollution index (API) values at the selected monitoring stations
obtained from the Department of Environment (DOE) in Malaysia. The API has
been developed based on the Pollutant Standard Index (PSI) and determined
by the average indices for five main pollutant variables, which are (PM10, O3,
SO2, CO and NO2), and then the maximum value among these five sub-indices
is chosen at a particular hour as the API value (DOE 2000).

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