Meteorological variables and concentration levels of particulate matter of 10 μm in Andacollo, Chile: A dispersion and entropy study

Abstract

The objective of this research study is to compare pollutant dispersion in a Gaussian model, using the wind rose from the city of Andacollo (Chile), with a model based on the chaos theory that uses raw public Andacollo station data from the Chilean National Air Quality Information System (SINCA, for its acronym in Spanish). The data consist of time series for particulate matter, temperature, relative humidity, pressure, solar radiation, and wind speed magnitude. The chaotic treatment of each series provides their corresponding Lyapunov exponent, Hurst coefficient, and correlation entropy. The chaotic approximation shows that entropies of meteorological variables act on that of the pollutant, causing an asymptotic decay according to the loss of persistence. This explains its localized thermal interactions. It is concluded that both models show similar predictions when comparing the decay of the pollutant PM10.