Mobile monitoring of particulate matter: State of art and perspectives

Özet

Due to the socio-economic impact and the consequences on human health, the pollution associated toParticulate Matter (PM) represents one of the main emergences at a global scale. For these reasons, in thelast decade we assisted to a continuously increasing interest in the mobile monitoring of PM on aregional and a local scale. Here we summarize the current status in this field, outlining the critical issuesand the perspectives. The growing availability of instruments designed and optimized to the real-timemonitoring of the air quality, considerably increased the spatial and temporal resolution of availabledatasets, actually improving air pollution maps and forecast models. However, several issues are stillunresolved, particularly in terms of data representativeness. Indeed, the future PM monitoring deviceshave to be designed to support the decisional process but also the management of environmentalemergencies in urban and industrial areas. The future of these devices is certainly the development ofcompact systems that will make possible a real-time characterization of size distribution, morphology,and chemical composition of the airborne particles.