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Title:

Development and Evaluation of a Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial System in Measuring Lower Tropospheric Ozone and Fine Aerosol Particles

Accession Number:

01698054

Record Type:

Component

Abstract:

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and low-cost sensors have been widely used to analyze air pollution causes and estimate citizen exposure levels to air pollutants over urban areas. However, the measurement uncertainties of UAS platforms are not clear enough due to harsh operation environments of upper air and strong uncertainties of low-cost sensors. This study aims developed fixed-wing UAS platform with low-cost ozone (O₃) and fine aerosol particle (PM₂.₅) sensors. A large tethered balloon platform, deployed with reference O₃ and PM₂.₅ monitors, was used to evaluate the UAS platform in capturing vertical variations of O₃ and PM₂.₅ concentrations within the lower (1000 m) troposphere. In addition, the portable monitors were also evaluated against standard monitors at ground-based stations. Results indicate that the portable monitors were capable of accurately capturing temporal variations of air pollutants at the ground-level. Measurements of the portable monitors had relatively good linear relationships with those of the reference monitors and thus can be calibrated by their linear fitting equations. In addition, the UAS and tethered balloon platforms had a satisfactory consistency in capturing the vertical variations of O₃ and PM₂.₅ concentrations. Discrepancies of the O₃ and PM₂.₅ measurements between the two platforms were mainly attributed to significant horizontal variations of the UAS measurements over the experimental area. Overall, this study proposed a method of deploying portable monitors on the UAS, the developed UAS platform is much reliable to obtain vertical profiles of O₃ and PM₂.₅ concentrations within the lower troposphere.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADC20 Standing Committee on Transportation and Air Quality.

Report/Paper Numbers:

19-01322

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

Authors:

Li, Xiao-Bing
Peng, Zhong-Ren

Pagination:

6p

Publication Date:

2019

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2019-1-13 to 2019-1-17
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

References

Subject Areas:

Aviation; Environment

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-01322

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Dec 7 2018 9:45AM