Deep Learning Architecture for Estimating Hourly Ground-Level PM2.5 Using Satellite Remote Sensing

The prediction of PM2.5 concentration is a canonical predictive challenge due to the distribution of PM_{2.5} appears serious spatiotemporal variability at multiple scales. Currently, using satellite-based remote sensing data to estimate ground-level PM2.5 is a promising method for providing spatiotemporal continuous information of PM2.5. In this letter, we proposed a deep neural network (DNN)-based PM2.5 prediction model to capture the spatiotemporal variability of ground-level PM2.5 using the remote sensing aerosol optical depth (AOD) data from the Himawari-8 satellite along with the conventional meteorological observation variables (denoted as PM25-DNN). The PM25-DNN model was trained and tested using the data from Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of China in 2017, and we compared the prediction performance between the PM25-DNN and the current state-of-the-art methods in this field. The results show that the PM25-DNN outperforms the other models with the cross-validated coefficient of determination (\text{R}^{2} ), root-mean-square error (RMSE), mean prediction error (MPE), and relative prediction error (RPE) were 0.84, 19.9~\mu \text{g}/\text{m}^{3} , 11.89~\mu \text{g}/\text{m}^{3} , and 41.21%, respectively. Then, the trained PM25-DNN model was applied to estimate the hourly gridded PM2.5 with 1-km spatial resolution. Our results indicate that the DNN architecture can capture the essential spatiotemporal distribution associated with PM2.5 only using AOD data and conventional meteorological observational variables without more handcrafted features. The proposed PM25-DNN model can greatly improve the accuracy of PM2.5 estimation, and it provides a new perspective for PM2.5 monitoring using end-to-end deep learning method.