Spatial modeling of daily concentrations of ground-level ozone in Montreal, Canada: A comparison of geostatistical approaches

Ground-level ozone (O3) is a powerful oxidizing agent and a harmful pollutant affecting human health, forests and crops. Estimating O3 exposure is a challenge because it exhibits complex spatiotemporal patterns. The aim in this study was to provide high-resolution maps (100 × 100 m) of O3 for the metropolitan area of Montreal, Canada. We assessed the kriging with external drift (KED) model to estimate O3 concentration by synoptic weather classes for 2010. We compared these results with ordinary kriging (OK), and a simple average of 12 monitoring stations. We also compared the estimates obtained for the 2010 summer with those from a Bayesian maximum entropy (BME) model reported in the literature (Adam-Poupart et al., 2014). The KED model with road and vegetation density as covariates showed good performance for all six synoptic classes (daily R2 estimates ranging from 0.77 to 0.92 and RMSE from 2.79 to 3.37 ppb). For the summer of 2010, the model using KED demonstrated the best results (R2 = 0.92; RMSE = 3.14 ppb), followed by the OK model (R2 = 0.85, RMSE = 4 ppb). Our results showed that errors appear to be substantially reduced with the KED model. This may increase our capacity of linking O3 levels to health problems by means of improved assessments of ambient exposures. However, future work integrating the temporal dependency in the data is needed to not overstate the performance of the KED model. •The KED model with road and vegetation density as covariates showed good performance for all six synoptic classes.•The model using KED demonstrated the best results (R2 = 0.92; RMSE = 3.14 ppb).•The model using OK demonstrated a R2 = 0.85 and RMSE = 4 ppb.•Our results showed that errors appear to be substantially reduced with the KED model.•When measurements at numerous monitoring stations in a region are available, it may be better to use KED.•The BME may be more useful for prediction when data is not available.