Characterizing outdoor infiltration and indoor contribution of PM2.5 with citizen-based low-cost monitoring data

Epidemiological research on the adverse health outcomes due to PM2.5 exposure frequently relies on measurements from regulatory air quality monitors to provide ambient exposure estimates, whereas personal PM2.5 exposure may deviate from ambient concentrations due to outdoor infiltration and contributions from indoor sources. Research in quantifying infiltration factors (F-inf), the fraction of outdoor PM2.5 that infiltrates indoors, has been historically limited in space and time due to the high costs of monitor deployment and maintenance. Recently, the growth of openly accessible, citizen-based PM2.5 measurements provides an unprecedented opportunity to characterize F-inf at large spatiotemporal scales. In this analysis, 91 consumer-grade PurpleAir indoor/outdoor monitor pairs were identified in California (41 residential houses and 50 public/commercial buildings) during a 20-month period with around 650000 h of paired PM2.5 measurements. An empirical method was developed based on local polynomial regression to estimate site-specific F-inf. The estimated site-specific F-inf had a mean of 0.26 (25th, 75th percentiles: [0.15, 0.34]) with a mean bootstrap standard deviation of 0.04. The F-inf estimates were toward the lower end of those reported previously. A threshold of ambient PM2.5 concentration, approximately 30 mu g/m(3), below which indoor sources contributed substantially to personal exposures, was also identified. The quantified relationship between indoor source contributions and ambient PM2.5 concentrations could serve as a metric of exposure errors when using outdoor monitors as an exposure proxy (without considering indoor-generated PM2.5), which may be of interest to epidemiological research. The proposed method can be generalized to larger geographical areas to better quantify PM2.5 outdoor infiltration and personal exposure. (C) 2020 The Author(s).

Automated summary

A study in California analyzed 91 consumer-grade PurpleAir indoor/outdoor monitor pairs over a 20-month period to estimate site-specific outdoor PM2.5 infiltration factors using a local polynomial regression method. The research identified a threshold for ambient PM2.5 concentration below which indoor sources significantly contributed to personal exposures.