Spatial Modeling of Air Pollution in Urban Areas Applying Fuzzy-AHP Method; a case study of Tehran, Iran

This paper aimed at evaluating current mapping air pollution severity of Tehran, capital of Iran, to form a basis of decision making for air quality enhancement. This city is continually challenging with air pollution problems, originating from huge population, abundant industries surrounded the city, absorption of considerable commuters, and topographic barriers. To achieve the above mentioned goal, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (Fuzzy-AHP) was employed in this paper by considering the tropospheric ozone (O3), nitrogen monoxide (NO), carbon monoxide (CO), and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) as the main pollutants influencing the study area of the research. In this regard, selected pollutants were extended to entire area by means of inverse distance weighting (IDW) method, and then were classified respect to the health concern degrees provided by air quality index (AQI). In this stage, experts’ ranking on the obtained maps allows the Fuzzy-AHP method to compute weight of each AQI class to reconstruct the criteria maps through an overlay process. Expert rankings and Fuzzy-AHP weight allocation involved again to specify contribution of the pollutants to obtain overall air pollution map by the weighted overlay process. Obtained results confirmed that the selected part of Tehran is facing crucial air pollution putting health of the city residents in danger, as well as unsavory climate change and habitat fall, unless adequate plans are applied. The Southern part of the study area resulted in higher pollution rate which is congruous with population distribution, industrial and green space structures’ placement, urban structure and inhabitant’s literacy as discussed in the paper.

کلیدواژه ها:

Air pollution mapping ، Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process ، Geospatial Information System ،