Characterization of hourly NOx atmospheric concentrations near the Venice International Airport with additive semi-parametric statistical models

An additive modeling approach is employed to provide a statistical description of hourly variation in concentrations of NOx measured in proximity of the Venice “Marco Polo” International Airport, Italy. Differently from several previous studies on airport emissions based on daily time series, the paper analyzes hourly data because variations of NOx concentrations during the day are informative about the prevailing emission source. The statistical analysis is carried out using a one-year time series. Confounder effects due to seasonality, meteorology and airport traffic volume are accounted for by suitable covariates. Four different model specifications of increasing complexity are considered. The model with the aircraft source expressed as the NOx emitted near the airport is found to have the best predictive quality. Although the aircraft source is statistically significant, the comparison of model-based predictions suggests that the relative impact of aircraft emissions to ambient NOx concentrations is limited and the road traffic is the likely dominant source near the sampling point.