Estimation of Daily Ground Level Air Pollution in Italian Municipalities with Machine Learning Models Using Sentinel-5P and ERA5 Data

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in air pollutants and their effects on human health. More generally, it has become evident how human, animal and environmental health are deeply interconnected within a One Health framework. Ground level air monitoring stations are sparse and thus have limited coverage due to high costs. Satellite and reanalysis data represent an alternative with high spatio-temporal resolution. The idea of this work is to build an Artificial Intelligence model for the estimation of surface-level daily concentrations of air pollutants over the entire Italian territory using satellite, climate reanalysis, geographical and social data. As ground truth we use data from the monitoring stations of the Regional Environmental Protection Agency (ARPA) covering the period 2019–2022 at municipal level. The analysis compares different models and applies an Explainable Artificial Intelligence approach to evaluate the role of individual features in the model. The best model reaches an average R2 of 0.84 ± 0.01 and MAE of 5.00 ± 0.01 μg/m3 across all pollutants which compare well with the body of literature. The XAI analysis highlights the pivotal role of satellite and climate reanalysis data. Our work can facilitate One Health surveys and help researchers and policy makers.