Papers by Camillo Silibello
Atmospheric Pollution Research, 2014
Passive air sampling (PAS) consisting of polyurethane foam (PUF) disks were deployed simultaneous... more Passive air sampling (PAS) consisting of polyurethane foam (PUF) disks were deployed simultaneously over four periods of 2-5 months at four locations in urban and suburban sites of Bari and San Vito Taranto in Southern Italy. The purpose of the study was to characterize the urban pollution for two groups of semi volatile organic compounds (SVOCs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), by using two different approaches consisting of PAS-PUF and air quality models (Flexible Air quality Regional Model, FARM). The concentrations in the air ranged from 20 to 200 pg m-3 for PCBs and from 5 to 48 ng m-3 for PAHs with the highest concentrations being detected at Bari center. PCB composition was dominated by the 3-Cl congeners (periods 1 and 2) and by 5-Cl (periods 3 and 4). PCB-28 and-37 were the most abundant congeners during the four periods. The PAHs profile was dominated by the 3-ring (70±6)%, with phenanthrene alone accounting for (49±2)%. On a seasonal basis opposite patterns were observed for PCBs and PAHs showing high PCB concentrations during the warm periods, period 3: summer and 2: spring, while PAHs were found during cool periods, period 4: autumn, and 1: winter. The results obtained from the application of the FARM model, during 2010, and limited to period 4 in this study, showed similar estimated levels for PCBs indicating a good performance for PCB modeled concentrations whilst for benzo[b]fluoranthene (B[b]F) the results showed a less better agreement. This study represents one of the few efforts at characterizing PCBs and PAHs compositions in ambient air in southern Italy and also represents one of the preliminary attempts at using PAS-PUF to give more insight into a modeling prediction in Italy. These results also provide useful information for the future development of the FARM model.
Radiation Protection Dosimetry, Dec 1, 1994
This paper oh,scribes research activities pelT/brnled to evaluate tile d(/lc'rent contribution (~... more This paper oh,scribes research activities pelT/brnled to evaluate tile d(/lc'rent contribution (~/l various sources to imloor radoll levels. UnderO,ing soil, buihting materials and outdoor air are considered as sources of imhmr radon. Tile rehtlive contrihutio,s ~71" the three sources are estimated by app@ing experimental and theoretical techniques to a lest chamber in which several parameters are monitored. The c~[]eets pro~hwed hy the increase h7 venlilatioll rate are evaluated in terms ~/' i/~/hwnce on imhmr radon levels.
Science of The Total Environment, Aug 1, 2023
Background: There is accumulating evidence that air pollution causes lung cancer. Still, question... more Background: There is accumulating evidence that air pollution causes lung cancer. Still, questions remain about exposure misclassification, the components of air pollution responsible, and the histological subtypes of lung cancer that might be produced. Methods: We investigated lung cancer incidence in relation to long-term exposure to three ambient air pollutants and proximity to major roads, using a Canadian population-based case-control study. We compared 2,390 incident, histologically confirmed lung cancer cases with 3,507 population controls in eight Canadian provinces from 1994 to 1997. We developed spatiotemporal models for the whole country to estimate annual residential exposure to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2), and ozone (O 3) over a 20-year exposure period. We carried out a subanalysis in urban centers, using exposures derived from fixed-site air pollution monitors, and also examined traffic proximity measures. Hierarchical logistic regression models incorporated a comprehensive set of individual and geographic covariates. Results: The increase in lung cancer incidence (expressed as fully adjusted odds ratios [ORs]) was 1.29 (95% confidence interval = 0.95-1.76) with a ten-unit increase in PM 2.5 (μg/m 3), 1.11 (1.00-1.24) with a ten-unit increase in NO 2 (ppb), and 1.09 (0.85-1.39) with a ten-unit increase in O 3 (ppb). The urban monitor-based subanalyses generally supported the national results, with larger associations for NO 2 (OR = 1.34; 1.07-1.69) per 10 ppb increase. No
Forests, Jun 16, 2023
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Atmospheric Environment, May 1, 2017
PNCs were measured directly outside 28 homes for three weeks in different seasons. LUR models wer... more PNCs were measured directly outside 28 homes for three weeks in different seasons. LUR models were developed using standard and enhanced GIS-derived predictor variables. Traffic intensity, population density and urban green were the main predictors of UFP. Building and street configuration variables improved LUR model performance. PNC exposure at a fine spatial resolution was successfully assessed.
urban climate, Dec 1, 2014
Abstract The Po Valley is a major populated area including different conurbations, with a populat... more Abstract The Po Valley is a major populated area including different conurbations, with a population density among the highest in Europe. The region is an air pollution hot spot, where the European air quality standards are exceeded for PM10, NO 2 and O 3 . The pollutants exported from the Po Valley to the surrounding areas have been investigated through the application of a chemical transport model. Emission sensitivity simulations have been performed to identify the Po Valley footprint and to quantify its influence on the atmospheric composition. Simulation results suggest that the Po Valley emissions impact extends up to 500 km, affecting Italy, the northern Mediterranean sea and the western Balkan peninsula. The outflow directions are determined by meteorological and topographic forcing. The surface area affected is larger during the winter, while the mass injected in the free troposphere is larger during the summer for pollutants with longer lifetime. Secondary PM components show an impact area wider than the other pollutants. NO 2 footprint and its contribution to local concentration are relevant especially during wintertime. The Po Valley emissions contribute to the production of ozone at regional scale during the summer, although this contribution remains limited to few percentage points of local concentration levels.
High ozone levels are regularly reached during summer period in South-European urban areas, claim... more High ozone levels are regularly reached during summer period in South-European urban areas, claiming for a careful design of primary pollutants emission reduction strategies. In this perspective, the CALGRID modeling system has been applied to Milano metropolitan area, located in the Po Valley, the most industrialized and populated area in Italy, presenting frequent stagnating meteorological conditions. For the first modeling exercise, a simulation domain of 100 * 100 km{sup 2} has been considered and a summer period, characterized by high photochemical activity, has been selected. Hourly emissions have been derived by spatially and temporally disaggregating national inventories data, while standard upper-air and ground-based meteorological data have been used as input to CALMET pre-processor. A careful analysis of simulation results against local network monitoring data revealed some critical points, related to both modeling assumptions and practical data availability.
Ten different combinations of ammonia and nitrogen oxides emission reduction scenarios have been ... more Ten different combinations of ammonia and nitrogen oxides emission reduction scenarios have been investigated. This analysis has been performed through the application of the chemical transport model (CTM) FARM on two monthly periods characterised by significant measured levels of ammonia and particulate matter, respectively during Spring and Autumn 2011. The simulation domain covers the whole Po Valley (hereafter P-V) and the Alpine Region, with a horizontal resolution of 4 km and 16 terrain-following vertical levels, irregularly spaced from the ground to 10000 m above surface level. The CTM was driven by meteorological input fields produced by the prognostic non-hydrostatic meteorological model RAMS; initial and boundary conditions (IC/BCs) have been derived from FARM national scale simulation at 12 km horizontal resolution. The base case emissions have been prepared merging high resolution bottom-up emission inventories developed by all the P-V administrative Regions applying the same methodology. Local inventories have been combined with the Italian national inventory and EMEP emission data for the portion of surrounding countries inside the simulation domain. Results obtained by the base case simulation (i.e. considering the actual emissions) have been compared with observed levels of PM 2.5 , PM 10 , ammonia, nitrogen oxides and ozone at different monitoring stations located in P-V. The amount and combination of emissions reduction needed to effectively reduce secondary PM levels has been estimated from the analysis of the ten different scenarios performed for the two investigated periods. The role of nitrogen oxides and ammonia on particle mass and composition is confirmed, claiming for the implementation of proper emission control strategies at regional level.
European Community Directive 2008/50/EC attributes a higher role to air quality models in air qua... more European Community Directive 2008/50/EC attributes a higher role to air quality models in air quality assessment and management, and establish criteria for acceptable model uncertainties or quality objectives as a function of pollutant. This study analyses the capacity of MINNI (Italian Integrated Assessment Modelling System for supporting the International Negotiation Process on Air Pollution and assessing Air Quality Policies at national/local level) atmospheric modelling system to simulate ozone concentrations over Italy for the years 1999, 2003 and 2005, according to the new EU criteria. Surface ozone concentrations over Italy exceed often the thresholds established in EU legislation to protect human health and to prevent damage to ecosystems. The yearly simulations were carried out using the national emission inventories for Italy and EMEP inventories for the other countries included in the computational domain. The meteorological conditions were simulated with RAMS driven by ECMWF initial and boundary conditions. The ozone formation and destruction under different conditions of solar radiation, temperature and chemical composition of atmosphere was computed with the photochemical mechanism SAPRC90. At most of the background stations (rural, urban, suburban) considered in the evaluation, the comparison of simulated and measured ozone concentrations shows a fair agreement between hourly observed and modelled ozone concentrations; furthermore RDE (Relative Directive Error) has values lower than that indicated in the directive. The modelling system exhibits good performance also with respect to other statistical indicators, such as MNBE (mean normalised bias error) which has values laying inside the range proposed in US-EPA's guidelines for an acceptable level of air quality model performance.
The EURODELTA III exercise allows a very comprehensive inter-comparison and evaluation of chemist... more The EURODELTA III exercise allows a very comprehensive inter-comparison and evaluation of chemistry transport models performance. Participating models were applied over four different one month period, within a rather limited number of years (from June 2006 to March 2009) thus allowing evaluating the influence of different meteorological conditions on model performance. The exercise was performed under strict requirements concerning the input data. As a consequence, there were very limited differences in the models set up, representing a sort of sensitivity analysis to several aspects of the modelling chains. The models were evaluated mainly on background stations. Even if the meteorology was
WIT transactions on engineering sciences, Mar 8, 2004
A comprehensive modelling system taking into account emission, transport, dispersion, deposition ... more A comprehensive modelling system taking into account emission, transport, dispersion, deposition and chemical transformation processes of gaseous pollutants has been used to simulate an ozone episode over the Piemonte Region in Northern Italy. A meteorological pre-processor (SURFPRO: SURrfaceatmosphere interFace PROcessor) has been developed and applied in order to estimate the parameters used to define the status of the lower part of the atmosphere commonly called the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL). The vertical exchanges between surface and lower atmospheric layers are defined estimating momentum, heat and moisture turbulent fluxes and PBL depth. The capability of the atmosphere to vertically redistribute the pollutants is represented by vertical diffusivities. The influence of different land use areas on diffusivities and other turbulent scaling parameters is shown confirming the importance of adequate descriptions of the surface cover. The effects of terrain slopes and shadow projection on incoming solar radiation and consequently on heat exchanges are also shown. Finally the good agreement between observed and predicted ozone concentration by the Eulerian photochemical model FARM (Flexible Air quality Regional Model) confirms the capability of the modelling system and the meteorological pre-processor to correctly describe chemical and physical processes that lead to the formation and the accumulation of ozone in Northern Italy.
Epidemiological studies about health effects of air quality are often based on data inferred by m... more Epidemiological studies about health effects of air quality are often based on data inferred by monitoring stations, and the issue of constructing pollutants exposure maps is crucial for improving such studies. The Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) exposure in urban areas is the major goal of the EXPAH LIFE+ Project, so an integrated approach, based on measurements and modeling techniques, has been applied to simulate PAHs concentration in the metropolitan area of Rome in a period of one year (June 2011-May 2012). Support Vector Machines (SVMs), which are a class of Machine Learning methods, have been applied. After a feature selection process, the SVM has been trained and tested with blind samples, showing very significant results. Then, the same SVM has been used for building PAHs daily exposure maps. Here, being not available the actual measurements, new indices have been considered for assessing the maps. All the outputs produced by the SVM have been also compared with those obtained by two applications of chemical transport models (FARM bc and FARM fc). The overall results suggest the applicability of SVM methods in estimating daily and annual PAHs exposure in urban areas.
Environment International, 2019
Background: Despite the relevance for occupational safety policies, the health effects of tempera... more Background: Despite the relevance for occupational safety policies, the health effects of temperature on occupational injuries have been scarcely investigated. A nationwide epidemiological study was carried out to estimate the risk of injuries for workers exposed to extreme temperature and identify economic sectors and jobs most at risk. Materials and methods: The daily time series of work-related injuries in the industrial and services sector from the Italian national workers' compensation authority (INAIL) were collected for each of the 8090 Italian municipalities in the period 2006-2010. Daily air temperatures with a 1 × 1 km resolution derived from satellite land surface temperature data using mixed regression models were included. Distributed lag non-linear models (DLNM) were used to estimate the association between daily mean air temperature and injuries at municipal level. A meta-analysis was then carried out to retrieve national estimates. The relative risk (RR) and attributable cases of work-related injuries for an increase in mean temperature above the 75th percentile (heat) and for a decrease below the 25th percentile (cold) were estimated. Effect modification by gender, age, firm size, economic sector and job type were also assessed. Results: The study considered 2,277,432 occupational injuries occurred in Italy in the period 2006-2010. There were significant effects for both heat and cold temperatures. The overall relative risks (RR) of occupational injury for heat and cold were 1.17 (95% CI: 1.14-1.21) and 1.23 (95% CI: 1.17-1.30), respectively. The number of occupational injuries attributable to temperatures above and below the thresholds was estimated to be 5211 per year. A higher risk of injury on hot days was found among males and young (age 15-34) workers occupied in small-medium size firms, while the opposite was observed on cold days. Construction workers showed the highest risk of injuries on hot days while fishing, transport, electricity, gas and water distribution workers did it on cold days. Conclusions: Prevention of the occupational exposure to extreme temperatures is a concern for occupational health and safety policies, and will become a critical issue in future years considering climate change.
Atmospheric Environment: X, 2019
• Carbonaceous aerosol model inter-comparison exercise using same input data. • Multi-model evalu... more • Carbonaceous aerosol model inter-comparison exercise using same input data. • Multi-model evaluation of primary and secondary organic aerosol at European level. • Seasonal, daily and hourly validation of modelled concentrations against measurements. • Comparison of modelled biogenic and anthropogenic secondary aerosol concentrations.
Six yearly simulations were performed: one over the whole Italy with horizontal spatial resolutio... more Six yearly simulations were performed: one over the whole Italy with horizontal spatial resolution of 20kmx20km (IT) and five over sub-domains including respectively north of Italy (NIT), centre of Italy (CIT), south of Italy (SIT), Sardinia and Sicily islands with horizontal spatial resolution 4kmx4km. The meteorological fields for IT simulation were produced with the prognostic meteorological model RAMS (Cotton et al., 2003) using the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) analysis at 0.5 degrees and 6 h resolution for the initial and boundary conditions. The meteorological fields for the simulations on sub-domains (NIT, CIT, etc) were downscaled from the meteorological fields predicted by RAMS at 20kmx20km spatial resolution by means of the diagnostic meteorological model LAPS (Local Analysis and Prediction System) (McGinley et al.,1991). The anthropogenic emission used for the simulation IT was derived from the diffuse emissions inventory at provincial level (APAT, 2000), while the ones for NIT, CIT and SIT simulations are based on a version of the same inventory scaled down to municipalities using a set of proxies.For the other countries included in the IT simulation domain, the emission inventory EMEP 1999 was used.
Aerosol and Air Quality Research, 2016
This study investigates the effect of grid resolution on the particulate matter (PM 10 , PM 2.5) ... more This study investigates the effect of grid resolution on the particulate matter (PM 10 , PM 2.5) mass concentrations and its chemical composition simulated with the AMS-MINNI modelling system. The air pollution was simulated over Italy with grid resolutions of 20 and 4 km, for a whole year. The gridded emissions were produced performing speciation and spacetime disaggregation of aggregated inventory data, using both land use information and anthropogenic activity-based profiles. Often, the fine grid simulations, based on high resolution gridded emissions, improved the agreement between model and measurements. In particular, the use of a fine grid improved predictions of primary species such as elemental carbon (EC), PM 10 and PM 2.5 mainly at urban stations. An improvement of predicted PM components and mass concentration at high altitudes sites was also observed, especially during winter. However, a general overestimation of nitrate (NO 3-) and of secondary inorganic species, more evident at night than during the day, was increased by employing a finer grid. Organic carbon (OC) was more affected by the grid resolution than the other species. At urban and kerbside stations, the use of a finer grid resulted in an overestimation of primary organic carbon aerosol (POC) but had a negligible effect on secondary organic carbon aerosol (SOC). The overestimation of carbonaceous aerosol (defined as the sum of EC, POC and SOC), at an urban station, opposite to general underestimation of this component by air quality (AQ) models, indicates that the anthropogenic emissions can contribute as much as organic model formulation at the success of simulation in reproducing experimental data. The modelling results obtained under stable meteorological conditions characterised by weak winds, which are often encountered in the Po Valley, did not improve substantially by the increase of the modelling system resolution.
Forests
Nature-based solutions and green urban infrastructures are becoming common measures in local air ... more Nature-based solutions and green urban infrastructures are becoming common measures in local air quality and climate strategies. However, there is a lack of analytical frameworks to anticipate the effect of such interventions on urban meteorology and air quality at a city scale. We present a modelling methodology that relies on the weather research and forecasting model (WRF) with the building effect parameterization (BEP) and the community multiscale air quality (CMAQ) model and apply it to assess envisaged plans involving vegetation in the Madrid (Spain) region. The study, developed within the VEGGAP Life project, includes the development of two detailed vegetation scenarios making use of Madrid’s municipality tree inventory (current situation) and future vegetation-related interventions. An annual simulation was performed for both scenarios (considering constant anthropogenic emissions) to identify (i) variations in surface temperature and the reasons for such changes, and (ii) i...
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
Environmental Science & Technology, 2019
The HERA-project will develop a European Environment and Health Research Agenda in close collabor... more The HERA-project will develop a European Environment and Health Research Agenda in close collaboration with different stakeholder communities to achieve wide societal participation in deciding on research priorities. It will develop strategies and tools to ensure the engagement of stakeholders, increasing coordination and cross-fertilisation of ideas, and contributing to the European environment and health process and policy activities. Stakeholders at EU, national and regional level will be identified to ensure a large and inclusive consultation process. Important stakeholder groups are relevant research-communities in the field of environment, health and climate change, policy makers (EU, national), civil society organisations, industries and businesses, workers' and patients' representatives, practitioners and international organisations. Stakeholders will be engaged via an interdisciplinary Consultation Group, national and regional focal points of larger networks (e.g. EEA-EIONET; WHO-Environmental Health Task Force) and seven regional consultative workshops. HERA will apply a multi-actor approach that will include stakeholders from different sectors and disciplines, thus allowing cross-fertilisation of ideas and research needs. It will encourage participation of representatives of countries with less developed environment and health policies by organising stakeholder workshops in all regions of Europe, by local partners. These groups will identify the actual needs across major topics as well as for cross-cutting issues and thus will provide input for the European environment, climate and health research agenda. Guidance for the stakeholder consultation will be developed to harmonize information gathering and to get synergies. A mix of consultation approaches and methods will be applied, including websurveys, workshops and webinars. As the stakeholder groups are very diverse, it is important to consider their specific perspectives and aims while selecting appropriate methods of engagement for each of them. The usefulness of various qualitative methods will be assessed regarding their potential to produce knowledge that is usable on a European scale.
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Papers by Camillo Silibello