Comparative analysis of air quality in Kyiv by GIS and remote sensing in 2019–2020

Abstract

Summary The issue of polluted air is relevant and crucial for supporting the sustainable development of the city and preserving the environment. For the capital of Ukraine, the difficulties associated with assessing air quality began from the moment the city began to occupy a leading position in the most polluted air among the world s cities. Today, there are three sources of information on obtaining air quality data. The first source is government air monitoring systems. In Ukraine, in most cases, this is not an automated monitoring (information cannot be promptly received by public authorities and the public), in contrast to European countries, where there is a single network of automatic monitoring stations that transmit online indicators of the air condition in the city. The second source is public monitoring. In terms of the number of stations and observation points, it is already significantly ahead of the existing system of state monitoring. Such monitoring stations have been installed by city residents, independent projects, organizations and local governments. Due to the large number of emissions from stationary enterprises and the constantly growing number of mobile sources of pollution (mostly vehicles), the level of development of the network of air monitoring stations is insufficient. Therefore, in this publication, we propose to investigate the state of air quality in the third way — using satellites that perform spectral analysis of entire layers of the atmosphere. The use of satellite data (remote sensing data) has the advantage of wide territorial coverage and low cost, but the use of these data requires a set of verification and comparison with ground-based instrumental measurements.