Optimal redistribution of the background ozone monitoring stations over France

Ozone is a harmful air pollutant at ground level, and its concentrations are routinely measured with monitoring networks. The network design problem aims at determining the optimal positioning of the monitoring stations. In this study, the background stations of the French routine pollution monitoring network (BDQA) are partially redistributed over France under a set of design objectives. These background stations report ozone variations at large spatial scale comparable with that of a chemistry-transport model (CTM). The design criterion needs to be defined on a regular grid that covers France, where in general no ozone observations are available for validation. Geostatistical ozone estimation methods are used to extrapolate concentrations to these grid nodes. The geostatistical criteria are introduced to minimize the theoretical error of those geostatistical extrapolations. A physical criterion is also introduced to measure the ability of a network to represent a physical ozone field retrieved from CTM simulations using geostatistical extrapolation methods. A third type of criteria of geometrical nature, e.g. a maximal coverage of the design domain, are based uniquely on the distance between the network stations. To complete the network design methodology, a stochastic optimization method, simulated annealing, is employed in the algorithm to select optimally the stations.Significant improvement with all the proposed criteria has been found for the optimally redistributed network against the original background BDQA network. For instance, the relative improvements in the physical criterion value range from 21% to 32% compared to randomly relocated networks. Different design criteria lead to different optimally relocated networks. The optimal networks under physical criteria are the most heterogeneously distributed. More background stations are displaced to the coast, frontiers, and large urban agglomerations, e.g. Paris and Marseilles. The ozone heterogeneous fields are not as well reconstructed from optimal networks under geostatistical or geometrical criteria as from the optimal network obtained with the physical criterion. The values of the physical criterion for the geostatistically and geometrically optimal networks show deteriorations of about 8% and 17% respectively compared to that of the physically optimal network.