Exploring the use of mobile sensors for noise and black carbon measurements in an urban environment

Arnaud Can , Timothy van Renterghem , Dick Botteldooren

Mobile sensors can be interesting in the context of monitoring of noise levels and airborne pollutant concentrations, to obtain measurements over a large zone with one single sensor, and to increase the spatial accuracy of predictions, while avoiding some expensive modelling. Mobile sensors can be combined to classical fixed station, to improve the accuracy and the reliability of predictions. The purpose of this paper is to explore how mobile measurements should be processed to obtain reliable estimations in spite of the strong variability of the data collected. Mobile measurements have been collected on a bicycle equipped with a global positioning system (GPS), in an area of Gent (Belgium). The 1s-sound pressure levels and 1s-black carbon concentrations evolutions were measured. In addition, 5 continuous monitoring fixed stations were placed at building facades. Different processing methods are compared, based on different temporal and spatial weighting aggregations. The possibility to take profit of the fixed stations to refine estimations is tested, according to the noise levels collected at fixed stations and the distance between mobile and fixed sensors. Finally, the operational conditions required to obtain reliable estimations based on mobile measures are discussed.

Mots clés: Mobile sensors; Noise mapping; Sensors network; Airborne pollutants

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Arnaud Can, Timothy van Renterghem, Dick Botteldooren. Exploring the use of mobile sensors for noise and black carbon measurements in an urban environment. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811071⟩