Accurate and interpretable air quality prediction remains a critical challenge for environmental health management due to complex, nonlinear interactions among emissions, meteorology, and atmospheric chemistry. This study presents a hybrid physics informed and multimodal deep learning framework for city-scale air quality and health risk prediction. The framework combines a Gaussian plume dispersion model with a residual CNN-LSTM network that learns data driven corrections while preserving physical consistency. Multimodal open datasets, including ground based pollutant sensors, meteorological records, and satellite derived aerosol and temperature features, are jointly fused to improve spatiotemporal fidelity. An Exposure Health Index module further links predicted pollutant fields with respiratory morbidity indicators, providing a quantitative bridge between atmospheric variability and health outcomes. Using open source datasets from Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam, the proposed approach achieves up to 25% lower mean absolute error and R2 values above 0.85 compared with physics only and purely data driven baselines. Explainability analyses using SHAP and spatial attention highlight physically plausible drivers and confirm feature relevance. The results demonstrate that physics guided residual learning can unify deterministic dispersion modeling and multimodal inference, providing a transparent, scalable, and reproducible foundation for air quality forecasting and health risk assessment.
Khaled M. Alhawiti (Wed,) studied this question.