Air Quality Prediction

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Air quality prediction estimates how pollutant concentrations such as PM2.5, PM10, ozone, and nitrogen dioxide vary across places and over time, helping inform public health alerts and exposure assessment. Methods range from statistical time-series models and recurrent networks to transformers, state-space models, and graph neural networks that combine station histories with weather, wind, terrain, satellite imagery, and land-use data. Physics-informed models represent processes such as pollutant transport and chemical change, while multimodal fusion, transfer learning, and lightweight edge models address sparse monitoring and deployment constraints. A central challenge is reliable performance beyond familiar regions and conditions: missing observations, geographic shifts, extreme events, and uncertain forecasts can undermine models that score well on conventional benchmarks, and predictive accuracy alone does not guarantee physically meaningful results.

Latest papers

43 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, up 67% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Apr 1, 2026

NeuroDDAF: Neural Dynamic Diffusion-Advection Fields with Evidential Fusion for Air Quality Forecasting

Accurate air quality forecasting is crucial for protecting public health and guiding environmental policy, yet it remains challenging due to nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics, wind-driven transport, and distribution shifts across regions. Physics-based models are interpretable but computationally expensive and often rely on restrictive assumptions, whereas purely data-driven models can be accurate but may lack robustness and calibrated uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose Neural Dynamic Diffusion-Advection Fields (NeuroDDAF), a physics-informed forecasting framework that unifies neural representation learning with open-system transport modeling. NeuroDDAF integrates (i) a GRU-Graph Attention encoder to capture temporal dynamics and wind-aware spatial interactions, (ii) a Fourier-domain diffusion-advection module with learnable residuals, (iii) a wind-modulated latent Neural ODE to model continuous-time evolution under time-varying connectivity, and (iv) an evidential fusion mechanism that adaptively combines physics-guided and neural forecasts while quantifying uncertainty. Experiments on four urban datasets (Beijing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Ancona) across 1-3 day horizons show that NeuroDDAF consistently outperforms strong baselines, including AirPhyNet, achieving up to 9.7% reduction in RMSE and 9.4% reduction in MAE on long-term forecasts. On the Beijing dataset, NeuroDDAF attains an RMSE of 41.63

μ

g/m

^3

for 1-day prediction and 48.88

μ

g/m

^3

for 3-day prediction, representing the best performance among all compared methods. In addition, NeuroDDAF improves cross-city generalization and yields well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, as confirmed by ensemble variance analysis and case studies under varying wind conditions.

Prasanjit Dey, Soumyabrata Dev, Angela Meyer +1

Air Quality Prediction Spatiotemporal Forecasting Physics-Informed ML Spatiotemporal GNNs

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Mar 31, 2026

Meteorology-Driven GPT4AP: A Multi-Task Forecasting LLM for Atmospheric Air Pollution in Data-Scarce Settings

Accurate forecasting of air pollution is important for environmental monitoring and policy support, yet data-driven models often suffer from limited generalization in regions with sparse observations. This paper presents Meteorology-Driven GPT for Air Pollution (GPT4AP), a parameter-efficient multi-task forecasting framework based on a pre-trained GPT-2 backbone and Gaussian rank-stabilized low-rank adaptation (rsLoRA). The model freezes the self-attention and feed-forward layers and adapts lightweight positional and output modules, substantially reducing the number of trainable parameters. GPT4AP is evaluated on six real-world air quality monitoring datasets under few-shot, zero-shot, and long-term forecasting settings. In the few-shot regime using 10% of the training data, GPT4AP achieves an average MSE/MAE of 0.686/0.442, outperforming DLinear (0.728/0.530) and ETSformer (0.734/0.505). In zero-shot cross-station transfer, the proposed model attains an average MSE/MAE of 0.529/0.403, demonstrating improved generalization compared with existing baselines. In long-term forecasting with full training data, GPT4AP remains competitive, achieving an average MAE of 0.429, while specialized time-series models show slightly lower errors. These results indicate that GPT4AP provides a data-efficient forecasting approach that performs robustly under limited supervision and domain shift, while maintaining competitive accuracy in data-rich settings.

Prasanjit Dey, Soumyabrata Dev, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

ADAPT SFI Research Centre, School of Computer Science, Technological University Dublin, Ireland · ADAPT SFI Research Centre, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin · School of Computer Science, Technological University Dublin, Ireland

Air Quality Prediction LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Long-Term Time Series Forecasting Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

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Mar 31, 2026

PollutionNet: A Vision Transformer Framework for Climatological Assessment of NO $_2$ and SO $_2$ Using Satellite-Ground Data Fusion

Accurate assessment of atmospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO

_2

) and sulfur dioxide (SO

_2

) is essential for understanding climate-air quality interactions, supporting environmental policy, and protecting public health. Traditional monitoring approaches face limitations: satellite observations provide broad spatial coverage but suffer from data gaps, while ground-based sensors offer high temporal resolution but limited spatial extent. To address these challenges, we propose PollutionNet, a Vision Transformer-based framework that integrates Sentinel-5P TROPOMI vertical column density (VCD) data with ground-level observations. By leveraging self-attention mechanisms, PollutionNet captures complex spatiotemporal dependencies that are often missed by conventional CNN and RNN models. Applied to Ireland (2020-2021), our case study demonstrates that PollutionNet achieves state-of-the-art performance (RMSE: 6.89

μ

g/m

^3

for NO

_2

, 4.49

μ

g/m

^3

for SO

_2

), reducing prediction errors by up to 14% compared to baseline models. Beyond accuracy gains, PollutionNet provides a scalable and data-efficient tool for applied climatology, enabling robust pollution assessments in regions with sparse monitoring networks. These results highlight the potential of advanced machine learning approaches to enhance climate-related air quality research, inform environmental management, and support sustainable policy decisions.

Prasanjit Dey, Soumyabrata Dev, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

School of Computer Science, Technological University Dublin, Ireland. · ADAPT Research Ireland Centre, Ireland. · School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland.

Air Quality Prediction Multimodal Sensor Fusion

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Mar 29, 2026

AIFS-COMPO: A Global Data-Driven Atmospheric Composition Forecasting System

We introduce AIFS-COMPO, a skilful medium-range data-driven global forecasting system for aerosols and reactive gases. Building on the ECMWF Artificial Intelligence Forecast System (AIFS), AIFS-COMPO employs a transformer-based encoder-processor-decoder architecture to jointly model meteorological and atmospheric composition variables. The model is trained on Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) reanalysis, analysis, and forecast data to learn the coupled dynamics of weather, emissions, transport, and atmospheric chemistry. We evaluate AIFS-COMPO against a range of atmospheric composition observations and compare its performance with the operational CAMS global forecasting system IFS-COMPO. The results show that AIFS-COMPO achieves comparable or improved forecast skill for several key species while requiring only a fraction of the computational resources. Furthermore, the efficiency of the approach enables forecasts beyond the current operational horizon, demonstrating the potential of AI-based systems for fast and accurate global atmospheric composition prediction.

Paula Harder, Johannes Flemming, Mihai Alexe +3

European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)

Air Quality Prediction Spatiotemporal Forecasting

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Mar 26, 2026

Interpretable PM2.5 Forecasting for Urban Air Quality: A Comparative Study of Adaptive Time-Series Models

Accurate short-term air-quality forecasting is essential for public health protection and urban management, yet many recent forecasting frameworks rely on complex, data-intensive, and computationally demanding models. This study investigates whether lightweight and interpretable forecasting approaches can provide competitive performance for hourly PM2.5 prediction in Beijing, China. Using multi-year pollutant and meteorological time-series data, we developed a leakage-aware forecasting workflow that combined chronological data partitioning, preprocessing, feature selection, and exogenous-driver modeling under the Perfect Prognosis setting. Three forecasting families were evaluated: SARIMAX, Facebook Prophet, and NeuralProphet. To assess practical deployment behavior, the models were tested under two adaptive regimes: weekly walk-forward refitting and frozen forecasting with online residual correction. Results showed clear differences in both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. Under walk-forward refitting, Facebook Prophet achieved the strongest completed performance, with an MAE of

37.61

and an RMSE of

50.10

, while also requiring substantially less execution time than NeuralProphet. In the frozen-model regime, online residual correction improved Facebook Prophet and SARIMAX, with corrected SARIMAX yielding the lowest overall error (MAE

32.50

; RMSE

46.85

). NeuralProphet remained less accurate and less stable across both regimes, and residual correction did not improve its forecasts. Notably, corrected Facebook Prophet reached nearly the same error as its walk-forward counterpart while reducing runtime from

15

min

21.91

sec to

46.60

sec. These findings show that lightweight additive forecasting strategies can remain highly competitive for urban air-quality prediction, offering a practical balance between accuracy, interpretability, ...

Moazzam Umer Gondal, Hamad ul Qudous, Asma Ahmad Farhan +1

School of Computing, National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences (FAST), Lahore 54000, Pakistan · College of Computing and Informatics, Saudi Electronic University, Riyadh, 11673, Saudi Arabia

Air Quality Prediction Time Series Forecasting Explainable Time Series Forecasting

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Mar 22, 2026

Benchmarking Scientific Machine Learning Models for Air Quality Data

Accurate air quality index (AQI) forecasting is essential for the protecting public health in rapidly growing urban regions, and the practical model evaluation and selection are often challenged by the lack of rigorous, region-specific benchmarking on standardized datasets. Physics-guided machine learning and deep learning models could be a good and effective solution to resolve such issues with more accurate and efficient AQI forecasting. This research study presents an explainable and comprehensive benchmark that enables a guideline and proposed physics-guided best model by benchmarking classical time-series, machine-learning, and deep-learning approaches for multi-horizon AQI forecasting in North Texas (Dallas County). Using publicly available U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) daily observations of air quality data from 2022 to 2024, we curate city-level time series for PM2.5 and O3 by aggregating station measurements and constructing lag-wise forecasting datasets for LAG in {1,7,14,30} days. For benchmarking the best model, linear regression (LR), SARIMAX, multilayer perceptrons (MLP), and LSTM networks are evaluated with the proposed physics-guided variants (MLP+Physics and LSTM+Physics) that incorporate the EPA breakpoint-based AQI formulation as a consistency constraint through a weighted loss. Experiments using chronological train-test splits and error metrics MAE, RMSE showed that deep-learning models outperform simpler baselines, while physics guidance improves stability and yields physically consistent pollutant with AQI relationships, with the largest benefits observed for short-horizon prediction and for PM2.5 and O3. Overall, the results provide a practical reference for selecting AQI forecasting models in North Texas and clarify when lightweight physics constraints meaningfully improve predictive performance across pollutants and forecast horizons.

Khawja Imran Masud, Venkata Sai Rahul Unnam, Sahara Ali

University of North Texas, 76205 Texas, USA

Air Quality Prediction Forecasting Benchmarks Time Series Forecasting Physics-Informed ML

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Mar 19, 2026

Rolling-Origin Validation Reverses Model Rankings in Multi-Step PM10 Forecasting: XGBoost, SARIMA, and Persistence

(a) Many air quality forecasting studies report gains from machine learning, but evaluations often use static chronological splits and omit persistence baselines, so the operational added value under routine updating is unclear. (b) Using 2,350 daily PM10 observations from 2017 to 2024 at an urban background monitoring station in southern Europe, we compare XGBoost and SARIMA against persistence under a static split and a rolling-origin protocol with monthly updates. We report horizon-specific skill and the predictability horizon, defined as the maximum horizon with positive persistence-relative skill. Static evaluation suggests XGBoost performs well from one to seven days ahead, but rolling-origin evaluation reverses rankings: XGBoost is not consistently better than persistence at short and intermediate horizons, whereas SARIMA remains positively skilled across the full range. (c) For researchers, static splits can overstate operational usefulness and change rankings. For practitioners, rolling-origin, persistence-referenced skill profiles show which methods stay reliable at each lead time.

Federico Garcia Crespi, Eduardo Yubero Funes, Marina Alfosea Simon

Departamento de Ingeniería de Computadores, Universidad Miguel Hernández, Elche, Spain · Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidad Miguel Hernández, Elche, Spain

Time Series Forecasting Air Quality Prediction Forecasting Benchmarks Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees

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Mar 18, 2026

End-to-end data-driven prediction of urban airflow and pollutant dispersion

Climate change and the rapid growth of urban populations are intensifying environmental stresses within cities, making the behavior of urban atmospheric flows a critical factor in public health, energy use, and overall livability. This study targets to develop fast and accurate models of urban pollutant dispersion to support decision-makers, enabling them to implement mitigation measures in a timely and cost-effective manner. To reach this goal, an end-to-end data-driven approach is proposed to model and predict the airflow and pollutant dispersion in a street canyon in skimming flow regime. A series of time-resolved snapshots obtained from large eddy simulation (LES) serves as the database. The proposed framework is based on four fundamental steps. Firstly, a reduced basis is obtained by spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD) of the database. The projection of the time series snapshot data onto the SPOD modes (time-domain approach) provides the temporal coefficients of the dynamics. Secondly, a nonlinear compression of the temporal coefficients is performed by autoencoder to reduce further the dimensionality of the problem. Thirdly, a reduced-order model (ROM) is learned in the latent space using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) netowrks. Finally, the pollutant dispersion is estimated from the predicted velocity field through convolutional neural network that maps both fields. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the model in predicting the instantaneous as well as statistically stationary fields over long time horizon.

Nishant Kumar, Franck Kerhervé, Lionel Agostini +1

Institut Pprime, CNRS, Université de Poitiers, ISAE-ENSMA, Curiosity Team, Bât. H2 - Bd. Marie & Pierre Curie TSA 51124, 86073 Poitiers Cedex 9, France

Air Quality Prediction Spatiotemporal Forecasting Reduced-Order Modeling

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Mar 18, 2026

AirDDE: Multifactor Neural Delay Differential Equations for Air Quality Forecasting

Accurate air quality forecasting is essential for public health and environmental sustainability, but remains challenging due to the complex pollutant dynamics. Existing deep learning methods often model pollutant dynamics as an instantaneous process, overlooking the intrinsic delays in pollutant propagation. Thus, we propose AirDDE, the first neural delay differential equation framework in this task that integrates delay modeling into a continuous-time pollutant evolution under physical guidance. Specifically, two novel components are introduced: (1) a memory-augmented attention module that retrieves globally and locally historical features, which can adaptively capture delay effects modulated by multifactor data; and (2) a physics-guided delay evolving function, grounded in the diffusion-advection equation, that models diffusion, delayed advection, and source/sink terms, which can capture delay-aware pollutant accumulation patterns with physical plausibility. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that AirDDE achieves the state-of-the-art forecasting performance with an average MAE reduction of 8.79% over the best baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/w2obin/airdde-aaai.

Binqing Wu, Zongjiang Shang, Shiyu Liu +3

State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University · College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University · State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization, Zhejiang University

Air Quality Prediction Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Physics-Informed ML

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Mar 12, 2026

Cross-Resolution Attention Network for High-Resolution PM2.5 Prediction

Vision Transformers have achieved remarkable success in spatio-temporal prediction, but their scalability remains limited for ultra-high-resolution, continent-scale domains required in real-world environmental monitoring. A single European air-quality map at 1 km resolution comprises 29 million pixels, far beyond the limits of naive self-attention. We introduce CRAN-PM, a dual-branch Vision Transformer that leverages cross-resolution attention to efficiently fuse global meteorological data (25 km) with local high-resolution PM2.5 at the current time (1 km). Instead of including physically driven factors like temperature and topography as input, we further introduce elevation-aware self-attention and wind-guided cross-attention to force the network to learn physically consistent feature representations for PM2.5 forecasting. CRAN-PM is fully trainable and memory-efficient, generating the complete 29-million-pixel European map in 1.8 seconds on a single GPU. Evaluated on daily PM2.5 forecasting throughout Europe in 2022 (362 days, 2,971 European Environment Agency (EEA) stations), it reduces RMSE by 4.7% at T+1 and 10.7% at T+3 compared to the best single-scale baseline, while reducing bias in complex terrain by 36%.

Ammar Kheder, Helmi Toropainen, Wenqing Peng +3

Department of Computational Engineering, LUT University, Finland · Atmospheric Modelling Centre Lahti (AMC-Lahti), Finland · Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 64, Helsinki 00014, Finland +1

Air Quality Prediction Spatiotemporal Forecasting Vision Transformer

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Mar 6, 2026

Bi Directional Feedback Fusion for Activity Aware Forecasting of Indoor CO2 and PM2.5

Indoor air quality (IAQ) forecasting plays a critical role in safeguarding occupant health, ensuring thermal comfort, and supporting intelligent building control. However, predicting future concentrations of key pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) remains challenging due to the complex interplay between environmental factors and highly dynamic occupant behaviours. Traditional data driven models primarily rely on historical sensor trajectories and often fail to anticipate behaviour induced emission spikes or rapid concentration shifts. To address these limitations, we present a dual stream bi directional feedback fusion framework that jointly models indoor environmental evolution and action derived embeddings representing human activities. The proposed architecture integrates a context aware modulation mechanism that adaptively scales and shifts each stream based on a shared, evolving fusion state, enabling the model to selectively emphasise behavioural cues or long term environmental trends. Furthermore, we introduce dual timescale temporal modules that independently capture gradual CO2 accumulation patterns and short term PM2.5 fluctuations. A composite loss function combining weighted mean squared error, spike aware penalties, and uncertainty regularisation facilitates robust learning under volatile indoor conditions. Extensive validation on real-world IAQ datasets demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms state of the art forecasting baselines while providing interpretable uncertainty estimates essential for practical deployment in smart buildings and health-aware monitoring systems.

Harshala Gammulle, Lidia Morawska, Sridha Sridharan +1

Signal Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Vision Technologies (SAIVT) Lab, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. · International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH), Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

Air Quality Prediction Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Multimodal Sensor Fusion

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Feb 23, 2026

NEXUS: A compact neural architecture for high-resolution spatiotemporal air quality forecasting in Delhi National Capital Region

Urban air pollution in megacities poses critical public health challenges, particularly in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) where severe degradation affects millions. We present NEXUS (Neural Extraction and Unified Spatiotemporal) architecture for forecasting carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide. Working with four years (2018--2021) of atmospheric data across sixteen spatial grids, NEXUS achieves R

^2

exceeding 0.94 for CO, 0.91 for NO, and 0.95 for SO

_2

using merely 18,748 parameters -- substantially fewer than SCINet (35,552), Autoformer (68,704), and FEDformer (298,080). The architecture integrates patch embedding, low-rank projections, and adaptive fusion mechanisms to decode complex atmospheric chemistry patterns. Our investigation uncovers distinct diurnal rhythms and pronounced seasonal variations, with winter months experiencing severe pollution episodes driven by temperature inversions and agricultural biomass burning. Analysis identifies critical meteorological thresholds, quantifies wind field impacts on pollutant dispersion, and maps spatial heterogeneity across the region. Extensive ablation experiments demonstrate each architectural component's role. NEXUS delivers superior predictive performance with remarkable computational efficiency, enabling real-time deployment for air quality monitoring systems.

Rampunit Kumar, Aditya Maheshwari

Lightweight Neural Networks Air Quality Prediction Spatiotemporal Forecasting Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

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Feb 18, 2026

TopoFlow: Topography-aware Pollutant Flow Learning for High-Resolution Air Quality Prediction

We propose TopoFlow (Topography-aware pollutant Flow learning), a physics-guided neural network for efficient, high-resolution air quality prediction. To explicitly embed physical processes into the learning framework, we identify two critical factors governing pollutant dynamics: topography and wind direction. Complex terrain can channel, block, and trap pollutants, while wind acts as a primary driver of their transport and dispersion. Building on these insights, TopoFlow leverages a vision transformer architecture with two novel mechanisms: topography-aware attention, which explicitly models terrain-induced flow patterns, and wind-guided patch reordering, which aligns spatial representations with prevailing wind directions. Trained on six years of high-resolution reanalysis data assimilating observations from over 1,400 surface monitoring stations across China, TopoFlow achieves a PM2.5 RMSE of 9.71 ug/m3, representing a 71-80% improvement over operational forecasting systems and a 13% improvement over state-of-the-art AI baselines. Forecast errors remain well below China's 24-hour air quality threshold of 75 ug/m3 (GB 3095-2012), enabling reliable discrimination between clean and polluted conditions. These performance gains are consistent across all four major pollutants and forecast lead times from 12 to 96 hours, demonstrating that principled integration of physical knowledge into neural networks can fundamentally advance air quality prediction.

Ammar Kheder, Helmi Toropainen, Wenqing Peng +4

Department of Computational Engineering, Lappeenranta–Lahti University of Technology LUT, Finland · Atmospheric Modelling Centre Lahti, Lahti University Campus, Finland · Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 64, Helsinki 00014, Finland +2

Air Quality Prediction Spatiotemporal Forecasting Physics-Informed ML

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