Remote sensing and air quality in urban areas

International audienceThis paper aims at showing the potentialities of the Earth observation (EO) data for the knowledge of the atmospheric pollutants concentration field over metropolitans areas. At present, deterministic modeling and decision support systems only use pollutants maps obtained with mathematical methods. But, given the few scattered stations measuring the pollutants concentrations, an accurate map of the spatial distribution is almost impossible with standard methods. We found a strong correlation between the black smoke (BS) concentrations and data from sensor TM6 of the Landsat satellite. The map derived from the EO data gives errors close to those obtained by standards methods. The representation is nevertheless closer to the real urban environment. In a near future, EO derived products could be treated in near real time in conjunction with pollutants measurements to provide accurate information to decision maker