How does CO2 Average Concentration Vary Spatially in Phoenix Metropolitan Area?
ABSTRACT Surface development is increasingly used in the field of air pollution to understand the variation of pollutants over space. Primary reason of creating surfaces for pollutants is lack of continuous data of pollutants over space. The objective of my paper is to determine spatial variation of CO2 over Phoenix Metropolitan Area. As concentration of CO2 over space is affected by several factors such as wind speed, wind direction, temperature, point of emission, altitude; the selection of appropriate interpolation techniques is the crucial part of the analysis. Radial Basis Function (RBF) and Ordinary Kriging (OK) are chosen over several other techniques, because of their suitability for the analysis. For this study, the data were collected by Department of Geography at Arizona State University. In order to verify the integrity of the CO2 data, data were closely observed before running the models. The data contains a total of 300 points with CO2 average concentration varying from 3
