Page 50 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 8

CPS2179 Giuliana Passamani et al.

A local dynamic multipollutant air quality
indicator
Giuliana Passamani, Paola Masotti, Matteo Tomaselli
Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento, Trento

Abstract
Given the worldwide concern on urban air pollution and its impact on public
health and damage to the environment, we aim to contribute to a better
reporting of information about air quality by suggesting a methodological
procedure leading to the estimation of a local pollution indicator. The
suggested procedure combines daily measurements of air pollutants with the
observed meteorological conditions, taking into account also the effects of
lagged pollution. The advantage of the dynamic factor model used for the
empirical analysis is that we can consider the dynamics of local air pollution as
a main determinant, together with the weather conditions, of what we actually
observe, and we can use the same estimated model for forecasting future air
pollution, given the meteorological predictions. The application regards
pollution data collected at some monitoring sites in the alpine province of
Trento.

Keywords
Air pollution; Air quality indicator; Dynamic-factor model

1. Introduction
It's well known that air, land and water pollution harms human health and
damages the environment. For these reasons, since the end of the past
century, environmental agencies and organizations, across the world, have
been working with the aim of reducing pollution and improving the quality of
the environment, through increasing information on the consequences of
pollution and working towards the introduction of environmental laws and
directives, in order to establish new and appropriate regulations. If we focus
our attention just on-air pollution, properly measuring it is the first and main
objective when we want to evaluate air quality in a particular region. To this
aim, the EU legislation defines evaluation and management methods for air
quality and set the standards for the monitoring networks. In the specialized
literature an important effort has been done towards quantifying air pollution
and observing its evolution, in particular, a substantial number of Air Quality
Indices (AQIs) have been proposed with the aim of combining observations
on a variety of pollutants at multiple monitoring sites, and giving rise to a
simple indicator summarizing air quality, as in Bruno and Cocchi (2002), where
they obtain a synthetic value by means of hierarchical median-maximum

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