A GIS-Based System for Real-Time Air Pollution Monitoring and Alerting Based on OGC Sensors Web Enablement Standards

Abstract

Air pollution is of significant concern to managers and disaster decision-makers in megacities. By considering the necessity of availability of correct and up to date spatial data, it is necessary to design and implement an environmental alerting and monitoring systems. A standard infrastructure is needed to utilize sensor observations in order to make preparedness for facing critical conditions. The use of sensor web is counted as a fundamental solution for the control and management of air quality in megacities. The proposed system uses the SWE framework of OGC, the reference authority in spatial data, to integrate sensors and their observations as well as to make use of them in the spatial data infrastructure. The developed system provides the capability to collect, transfer, share, and process the sensor observations, calculate the air quality condition and report real-time critical conditions. A four-tier architectural structure including Sensor, Web service, Logical and Presentation layer designed. The system using defined routines and subsystems applies web sensor data to a set of web services to produce alerting information. Developed system was assessed by sensor observations measures the concentration of carbon monoxide, ozone, and sulfur dioxide by 20 stations located in Tehran. In this way, the real-time air quality index was calculated, and critical conditions were sent through email to those users who had been registered to the system. In addition interpolation maps of the observations along with time diagrams of sensors observations can be obtained through a chain of processes carried out by the process service.