Atmospheric Environment Vol. 31, No. 24, pp.

4253-4254 1997
1997 Elsevier Science Ltd
All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain

Perganlon
PlI: S1352--2310(97)00109-X

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NEW DIRECTIONS
TOWARDS BETTER H U M A N EXPOSURE ESTIMATES FOR SETTING
OF AIR QUALITY STANDARDS
The adverse health effects associated with urban
air pollution, which include respiratory morbidity,
cardiovascular diseases and mortality, have contributed in creating public awareness of this kind of
pollution. Health risk evaluation and assessment
have now become important since these serve as
the basis for any re-formulation or review of
current air quality standards. While such standards
are intended to protect public health and the
environment in general, they may have a negative
impact on the economy of the region (as discussed
by S. K. Friedlander and M. Lippmann, in
Environmental Science and Technology, 28, pp.
148A-150A, 1994). Hence, exact measurements and
modelling of human exposures to environmental
pollutants are of crucial importance for the realistic
evaluation of public health risk and setting of
standards.
If we assume the pollutant concentration to be
spatially uniform over some three-dimensional
space (technically called a microenvironment) such
as the volume of an office or the confines of a
street, then the exposure for a person is calculated
as the product of the pollutant concentration
and time spent in that microenvironment. The
integrated human exposure would be the sum
of all such products. This assumption of spatial
uniformity in exposure models used in impact
assessments can be erroneous for certain microenvironments. The fact that fixed air monitoring
stations observe air quality levels that are different
from those people come into contact with in
their daily lives, was identified as early as 1980 by
W. R. Ott at Stanford University (Department of
Statistics Technical Report No. 32). More recently,
J. J. Vostal pointed out in Environmental Health
Perspectives (102, Supplement 4, pp. 101-106, 1994)
that oversimplified assumptions are frequently made
in exposure estimates, such as that pollutant
concentrations in various microenvironments are
identical to those recorded by remote air quality
monitors.
One microenvironment o f particular note is
the city street. We have developed a 'Street Level
Air Quality' (SLAQ) model (to be presented by
A. Micallef, R. B. Singh and J. J. Coils at the
l lth Annual Conference of The Aerosol Society,
U.K., 1997). This was run for different traffic and

meteorological conditions to generate lee and

windward vertical concentration profiles of suspended particulate matter and PM~0. Examples are
shown in Figure 1. The modelled, geometricallysymmetric, four-lane street had a width-to-height
ratio equal to 3.0 and a length of 200 m. The wind
was blowing normal to its orientation. The average
speed of the vehicles was assumed to be that of
typical urban areas, i.e. 20 kph. Figure l(a)
illustrates the vertical concentration profiles
obtained when traffic was heavy (c. 400 vehicles per
lane per hour) and turbulence was low (assuming
roof-top wind speed and insolation of 0.9 m s-1
and 0.1 kW m -2, respectively) giving rise to a
relatively large vertical concentration gradient. The
vertical concentration profiles in Figure l(b) were
for relatively low traffic volume (c. 140 vehicles per
lane per hour) and high environmentally-induced
turbulence (assuming roof-top wind speed and
insolation of 3.0 m s -1 and 0.5 kW m -2,
respectively).
In considering these variations in particulate
concentration in the street microenvironment, one
must bear in mind that epidemiological studies o f
urban air pollution have shown adverse health
effects to increase at the rate of 1% for each
1 /~g m -3 increase in black smoke (J. Sunyer et al.,
American Journal of Epidemiology, 134, pp. 277286, 1991), while studies conducted in different
cities of the United States showed that a rise in
PM10 of about 10 #g m -3 (as a 24-hour average)
may be associated with an increase in daily
mortality of about 1% (Expert Panel on Air
Quality Standards, Particles, HMSO, 1995). The
Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants
(Non-biological Particles and Health, HMSO, 1995)
posed another interesting and logical argument
which supports the idea that a small rise in PM10
concentration could be hazardous. They argued
that while a 1 #m particle of unit density is
equivalent to one-thousand 0.1 /~m particles in
terms of mass, the latter will have a surface area
ten times greater than the 1 /~m particle. Hence a
10% increase in PMI0 could represent a very large
percentage increase of both the number and surface
area of particles, and hence also of the toxic load
presented to the respiratory system.

4253

4254

New Directions

4O

'~20

offi30

7o.
,30
0
[~

30
.t ~. ~

,~----,t

15- -- ~-co)-:
;90
1

l-ldght(m)

l
2
I t ~ t (m)

SPM (leeward) -41"- SPM ( w i n d w a r d ~ pMx (leeward) -'~'- PMI (windward) [

Fig. I. Vertical concentration profiles of vehicle-generated

total suspended particulate matter (SPM) and PM~0 for
the lee and windward sides of a street canyon for different
traffic and meteorological conditions. See text for details.

The time is ripe, theretbre, to refine exposure

models by further subdividing outdoor and
indoor microenvironments, into what we may call
'sub-microenvironments', consisting of different
breathing zones or layers associated with different
height groups. This more rigorous approach in
exposure modelling would lead to better exposure
estimates and health risk evaluation, and possibly
to the identification of correlations between specific
air pollution-induced diseases, and different height
groups. Naturally, the incidence of these diseases
will not be a simple function of height but other

factors will have to be taken into account.

Certainly, further experimental and modelling work
is warranted in this direction as it would give us
a clear indication of the severity of the problem
and help us protect the urban dwellers who are
probably the ones at higher risk. All this may lead
to a re-thinking of the whole concept of air quality
standards and limit values and to the development
of protocols, relating to both modelling and
monitoring of air pollution, which would take into
account the above-mentioned t:actors. Review, as
well as re-formulation of the concept of air quality
standards may have to be a challenge for the year
2000.
A.M. wishes to thank the Commonwealth
Scholarship Commission in London for sponsoring
his doctoral studies.
Jeremy J. Coils ~ and Alfred Micallef b
Department of Physiology and
Environmental Science,
University of Nottingham,
Sutton Bonington Campus,
Loughborough LE12 5RD
U.K.
e-mail: ~'jeremy.colls~a nottingham.ac.uk
email: bsbxamm(~v sbn2.nott.ac.uk

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Please see http://www.uea.ac.uk/~e044/newd.htm for further details, or contact Dr W. T. Sturges: e-mail
w.sturges(a:uea.ac.uk, ph. +44-1603-592018. North American authors may contact Dr A. Lefohn: e-mail
75655.1156(wcompuserve.com, ph. + 1-406-443-3389.