Spatiotemporal continuous estimates of daily 1 km PM2.5 from 2000 to present under the Tracking Air Pollution in China (TAP) framework

Abstract

High spatial resolution PM2.5 data covering a long time period are urgently needed to support population exposure assessment and refined air quality management. In this study, we provided complete-coverage PM2.5 predictions with a 1 km spatial resolution from 2000 to the present under the Tracking Air Pollution in China (TAP, http://tapdata.org.cn/, last access: 3 October 2022) framework. To support high spatial resolution modeling, we collected PM2.5 measurements from both national and local monitoring stations. To correctly reflect the temporal variations in land cover characteristics that affected the local variations in PM2.5, we constructed continuous annual geoinformation datasets, including the road maps and ensemble gridded population maps, in China from 2000 to 2021. We also examined various model structures and predictor combinations to balance the computational cost and model performance. The final model fused 10 km TAP PM2.5 predictions from our previous work, 1 km satellite aerosol optical depth retrievals, and land use parameters with a random forest model. Our annual model had an out-of-bag R2 ranging between 0.80 and 0.84, and our hindcast model had a by-year cross-validation R2 of 0.76. This open-access, 1 km resolution PM2.5 data product, with complete coverage, successfully revealed the local-scale spatial variations in PM2.5 and could benefit environmental studies and policymaking.