Air quality index assessment prelude to mitigate environmental hazards

Air pollution has been a major transboundary problem and a matter of global concern for decades. Climate change and air pollution are closely coupled. Just as air pollution can have adverse effects on human health and ecosystems, it can also impact the earth's climate. As we enter an era of rapid climate change, the implications for air quality need to be better understood, both for the purpose of air quality management and as one of the societal consequences of climate change. In this study, an attempt has been made to estimate the current air quality to forecast the air quality index of an urban station Kolkata (22.65A degrees N, 88.45A degrees E), India for the next 5 years with neural network models. The annual and seasonal variability in the air quality indicates that the winter season is mostly affected by the pollutants. Air quality index (AQI) is estimated as a geometric mean of the pollutants considered. Different neural network models are attempted to select the best model to forecast the AQI of Kolkata. The meteorological parameters and AQI of the previous day are utilized to train the models to forecast the AQI of the next day during the period from 2003 to 2012. The selection of the best model is made after validation with observation from 2013 to 2015. The radial basis functional (RBF) model is found to be the best network model for the purpose. The RBF model with various architectures is tried to obtain precise forecast with minimum error. RBF of 5:5-91-1:1 structure is found to be the best fit for forecasting the AQI of Kolkata.