Analyzing SO2 concentration and wind directions during a short monitoring campaign at a site far from the industrial pole of La Plata Argentina

GUSTAVO RATTO; FABIAN VIDELA; RICARDO MARONNA

ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT

Springer

Año: 2008

0167-6369

This article presents and discusses SO2 air quality concentrations (ppbv) together with wind speeds and directions measurements carried out between 1st September and 21st December of 2005 in a site located 8.5 Km far from the Industrial Pole of La Plata area. As the city and its surroundings have no official monitoring network, the current work enriches the air quality information available of the zone and settles basic orientations to the future siting of monitoring stations. Statistical techniques such as frequency distribution, test for outliers and trends, dissimilarity distance criterion and robust regression were applied along this work. In relation to SO2 concentrations low values were found during this short campaign considering daily averages (with a maximum of 8.5 ppbv) and hourly averages (with a maximum of 25.9 ppbv); WHO guidelines were never surpassed. Nevertheless, a strong dependence between wind directions carrying air pollutants from the Industrial Pole and hourly concentration peaks were found. Due to low monthly SO2 concentrations and the decreasing trend of the time series found, this article proposes, as an example, the implementation of an alternative discontinuous method to the continuous analyzer used in the current campaign. Our results state that sampling every 7 days at 13:00- 13:59 hs. (local time) would be enough to get representative values of the air quality.2 air quality concentrations (ppbv) together with wind speeds and directions measurements carried out between 1st September and 21st December of 2005 in a site located 8.5 Km far from the Industrial Pole of La Plata area. As the city and its surroundings have no official monitoring network, the current work enriches the air quality information available of the zone and settles basic orientations to the future siting of monitoring stations. Statistical techniques such as frequency distribution, test for outliers and trends, dissimilarity distance criterion and robust regression were applied along this work. In relation to SO2 concentrations low values were found during this short campaign considering daily averages (with a maximum of 8.5 ppbv) and hourly averages (with a maximum of 25.9 ppbv); WHO guidelines were never surpassed. Nevertheless, a strong dependence between wind directions carrying air pollutants from the Industrial Pole and hourly concentration peaks were found. Due to low monthly SO2 concentrations and the decreasing trend of the time series found, this article proposes, as an example, the implementation of an alternative discontinuous method to the continuous analyzer used in the current campaign. Our results state that sampling every 7 days at 13:00- 13:59 hs. (local time) would be enough to get representative values of the air quality.