The regional prediction model of PM10 concentrations for Turkey

This study is aimed to predict a regional model for weekly PM10 concentrations measured air pollution monitoring stations in Turkey. There are seven geographical regions in Turkey and numerous monitoring stations at each region. Predicting a model conventionally for each monitoring station requires a lot of labor and time and it may lead to degradation in quality of prediction when the number of measurements obtained from any õmonitoring station is small. Besides, prediction models obtained by this way only reflect the air pollutant behavior of a small area. This study uses Fuzzy C-Auto Regressive Model (FCARM) in order to find a prediction model to be reflected the regional behavior of weekly PM10 concentrations. The superiority of FCARM is to have the ability of considering simultaneously PM10 concentrations measured monitoring stations in the specified region. Besides, it also works even if the number of measurements obtained from the monitoring stations is different or small. In order to evaluate the performance of FCARM, FCARM is executed for all regions in Turkey and prediction results are compared to statistical Autoregressive (AR) Models predicted for each station separately. According to Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) criteria, it is observed that FCARM provides the better predictions with a less number of models.