Development of a PM2.5 Forecasting System Integrating Low-cost Sensors for Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Air pollution is a serious concern in urban areas, especially cities such as Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Because the air quality directly affects people’s health, air quality monitoring is urgently needed. In this study, the models of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF), Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emission (SMOKE), and Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) were integrated to develop an air quality forecasting system. Drawing input data from transportation and industrial emission inventories, the forecasting system was calibrated and configured using local parameters to deliver hourly forecasts for HCMC. To increase the accuracy of WRF and the meteorological forecasting, the global DEM and land use data were replaced by Lidar data, and land use data were also retrieved from MODIS. Output from the MOZART model served as the boundary conditions for CMAQ, and AOD values reported by the MODIS Aerosol Product were assimilated to enhance the accuracy of the results. A low-cost PM2.5 sensor connected to a LinkIt ONE, a development board for Internet of things (IoT) devices, was employed for calibration and verification. The strong correlation (R2 = 0.8) between the measured and predicted concentrations indicates that the estimates delivered by the proposed forecasting system are consistent with the values obtained via monitoring.