bogdanbora-source/Low-Cost-Station-for-Monitoring-of-Climatic-Parameters-Lightning-Activity-and-Pollutant-Dispersion: An Experimental Low-Cost Station for Coupled Monitoring of Climatic Parameters, Lightning Activity and Pollutant Dispersion, with an Adapted OML Multi-Gaussian Model
Year: 2026
Type: software
Abstract: Air pollution in urban environments is governed jointly by emission sources and by the meteorological state of the atmosphere, yet low-cost monitoring platforms rarely measure both simultaneously. This work presents a two-node experimental station, built from commodity microcontroller hardware, that measures climatic parameters, solar irradiance, electromagnetic (lightning) activity and the concentrations of particulate and gaseous pollutants from a single site, and couples these measurements to an implementation of the OML multi-Gaussian dispersion model. The station was deployed on rooftop sites in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, between April 2024 and April 2025. Three families of results are reported. First, pollutant concentrations covary strongly and inversely with solar irradiance over the diurnal cycle: mean PM2.5 fell from 33.9 μg/m³ at night to 26.7 μg/m³ during daylight hours, consistent with convective dilution of the boundary layer rather than with any change in emission rate. Second, thunderstorm activity separates particulate and gaseous species in opposite directions, with PM2.5 increasing and NO2 decreasing as a function of distance from the storm, which is consistent with wet scavenging of particles alongside lightning-generated NOx. Third, a secondary ozone proxy correlates more strongly with the product of NO2 and volatile organic compound concentrations (r = 0.75) than with either precursor alone (r = 0.41 and r = 0.61 respectively), reproducing from ground-level low-cost sensors the multiplicative structure expected of photochemical ozone formation. A random-forest model trained on 400 samples localised a point source in the same city with close agreement to ground truth. T Keywords: low-cost air quality monitoring; atmospheric dispersion; OML multi-Gaussian model; lightning-generated NOx; solar irradiance; boundary-layer convection; photochemical ozone; random forest source localisation
Author: Bogdan Bora
Language: English
Subfield: Environmental Engineering
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203605184