Full-coverage spatiotemporal mapping of ambient PM2.5 and PM10 over China from Sentinel-5P and assimilated datasets: Considering the precursors and chemical compositions.

Abstract Ambient concentrations of particulate matters (PM2.5 and PM10) are significant indicators for monitoring the air quality relevant to living conditions. At present, most remote sensing based approaches for the estimation of PM2.5 and PM10 employed Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) products as the main variate. Nevertheless, the coverage of missing data is generally large in AOD products, which can cause deviations in practical applications of estimated PM2.5 and PM10 (e.g., air quality monitoring and exposure evaluation). To efficiently address this issue, our study explores a novel approach using the datasets of the precursors & chemical compositions for PM2.5 and PM10 instead of AOD products. Specifically, the daily full-coverage ambient concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10 are estimated at 5-km (0.05°) spatial girds across China based on Sentinel-5P and assimilated datasets (GEOS-FP). The estimation models are acquired via an advanced ensemble learning method named Light Gradient Boosting Machine in this paper. For comparison, the Deep Blue AOD product from VIIRS is adopted in a similar framework as a baseline (AOD-based). Validation results show that the ambient concentrations are well estimated through the proposed approach, with the space-based Cross-Validation R2s and RMSEs of 0.88 (0.83) and 11.549 (22.9) μg/m3 for PM2.5 (PM10), respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed approach achieves better performance than the AOD-based in different cases (e.g., overall and seasonal). Compared to the related previous works over China, the estimation accuracy of our method is also satisfactory. Regarding the mapping, the estimated results through the proposed approach display consecutive spatial distribution and can exactly express the seasonal variations of PM2.5 and PM10. The proposed approach could efficiently present daily full-coverage results at 5-km spatial grids. It has a large potential to be extended for providing global accurate ambient concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10 at multiple temporal scales (e.g., daily and annual).