Design methodology for optimum dosage air monitoring site selection

Abstract An air monitoring site selection procedure has been developed that ranks potential air monitoring sites according to their ability to represent the ambient dosage (i.e. the product of the concentration by exposure time) pattern in a monitoring network. The Dosage Monitoring Survey Design (DMSS) analyzes the dosage impact at grid receptors by dispersion modeling. High-dosage grids become potential monitoring sites. The uniqueness of DMSS is the introduction of a cluster of contiguous grid receptors that exceed a threshold value. One station is assigned to the cluster, thus eliminating redundancies among adjacent high dosage grids. The site selection procedure specifies locations for high-dosage monitoring stations along with the cluster area capabilities of each station. An efficiency term based on the ratio of a station's dosage measuring capabilities to the total dosage in the network provides a method of ranking stations. An analysis of the design procedure shows that as the threshold concentration decreased the distance from the source where the maximum dosage was found increased and there was a slight increase in station efficiency. Also, as averaging time increased, higher efficiencies were achieved for individual stations.