Mobile monitoring of particulate matter: State of art and perspectives

Due to the socio-economic impact and the consequences on human health, the pollution associated to Particulate Matter (PM) represents one of the main emergences at a global scale. For these reasons, in the last decade we assisted to a continuously increasing interest in the mobile monitoring of PM on a regional and a local scale. Here we summarize the current status in this field, outlining the critical issues and the perspectives. The growing availability of instruments designed and optimized to the real-time monitoring of the air quality, considerably increased the spatial and temporal resolution of available datasets, actually improving air pollution maps and forecast models. However, several issues are still unresolved, particularly in terms of data representativeness. Indeed, the future PM monitoring devices have to be designed to support the decisional process but also the management of environmental emergencies in urban and industrial areas. The future of these devices is certainly the development of compact systems that will make possible a real-time characterization of size distribution, morphology, and chemical composition of the airborne particles.