Exposure estimation errors to nitrogen oxides on a population scale due to daytime activity away from home

Accurate estimation of exposure to air pollution is necessary for assessing the impact of air pollution on the public health. Most environmental epidemiology studies assign the home address exposure to the study subjects. Here, we quantify the exposure estimation error at the population scale due to assigning it solely at the residence place. A cohort of most schoolchildren in Israel (~950,000), age 6-18, and a representative cohort of Israeli adults (~380,000), age 24-65, were used. For each subject the home and the work or school addresses were geocoded. Together, these two microenvironments account for the locations at which people are present during most of the weekdays. For each subject, we estimated ambient nitrogen oxide concentrations at the home and work or school addresses using two air quality models: a stationary land use regression model and a dynamic dispersion-like model. On average, accounting for the subjects' work or school address as well as for the daily pollutant variation reduced the estimation error of exposure to ambient NO_x/NO₂ by 5-10ppb, since daytime concentrations at work/school and at home can differ significantly. These results were consistent regardless which air quality model as used and even for subjects that work or study close to their home. Yet, due to their usually short commute, assigning schoolchildren exposure solely at their residential place seems to be a reasonable estimation. In contrast, since adults commute for longer distances, assigning exposure of adults only at the residential place has a lower correlation with the daily weighted exposure, resulting in larger exposure estimation errors. We show that exposure misclassification can result from not accounting for the subjects' time-location trajectories through the spatiotemporally varying pollutant concentrations field.