Mobile Monitoring the Spatial Variability of Trace Gas and Particulate Concentrations in Champaign County

Trace gas concentrations, along with PM10 and PM2.5, are shown to have both acute and long-term anthropogenic impacts in certain cases where outstanding exposure levels and repeated incidents of exposure are recorded. The United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Bondville, IL stationary pollutant monitoring sites provide adequate evidence of temporal variation between CO, NO2, SO2, O3, PM10, and PM2.5, along with other particulates, however stationary monitoring sites cannot capture the spatial variation of pollutants between the predetermined site locations. Therefore, mobile monitoring is one technique to capture the primary and secondary production of these compounds on a smaller scale, over a defined area of interest. In order to investigate the sources and concentrations of these pollutants in the field, we deployed a bicycle with an attached ARISense electrochemical instrument around urban and rural areas within the Urbana-Champaign vicinity of the University of Illinois. With samples taken in 5 second intervals, along with 1 second GPS timestamp tracking, we are able to map the diurnal variation of pollutants under different exposure criteria. Mapping out these diurnal patterns and concentration fluctuations under various meteorological conditions and comparing these results to historical trends provide us with some key implications for understanding the effects of exposure on human health.