Deciphering urban traffic impacts on air quality by deep learning and emission inventory

Air pollution is a major obstacle to future sustainability, and traffic pollution has become a large drag on the sustainable developments of future metropolises. Here, combined with the large volume of real-time monitoring data, we propose a deep learning model, iDeepAir, to predict surface-level PM_2.5 concentration in Shanghai megacity and link with MEIC emission inventory creatively to decipher urban traffic impacts on air quality. Our model exhibits high-fidelity in reproducing pollutant concentrations and reduces the MAE from 25.355 µg/m³ to 12.283 µg/m³ compared with other models. And identifies the ranking of major factors, local meteorological conditions have become a nonnegligible factor. Layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) is used here to enhance the interpretability of the model and we visualize and analyze the reasons for the different correlation between traffic density and PM_2.5 concentration in various regions of Shanghai. Meanwhile, As the strict and effective industrial emission reduction measurements implementing in China, the contribution of urban traffic to PM_2.5 formation calculated by combining MEIC emission inventory and LRP is gradually increasing from 18.03% in 2011 to 24.37% in 2017 in Shanghai, and the impact of traffic emissions would be ever-prominent in 2030 according to our prediction. We also infer that the promotion of vehicular electrification would achieve further alleviation of PM_2.5 about 8.45% by 2030 gradually. These insights are of great significance to provide the decision-making basis for accurate and high-efficient traffic management and urban pollution control, and eventually benefit people's lives and high-quality sustainable developments of cities.