Comparison of maritime transport influence of SO2 levels in Algeciras and Alcornocales Park (Spain)

Resumen

The main aim of this work was to measure the influence of the volume of shipping over the Sulphur dioxide (SO2) concentration in the air pollution in two monitoring stations located at Algeciras city and Alcornocales Park developing the same analysis in these two locations. The target is to demonstrate the assumption that Algeciras is more affected by SO2 than Alcornocales Park which is 30 km far away from Algeciras Port. A multiple regression approach has been applied using wind data: wind direction (degrees) and wind speed (km/h) recorded in two weather stations, together with the volume of the gross tonnage per hour (GT/h) of vessels in the Bay of Algeciras to estimate SO2 concentration values in the two stations Algeciras and Alcornocales. The database contains records of hourly samples of these variables during the year 2019. Different artificial neural networks (ANNs) models were compared and the results showed that SO2 in Algeciras station could be better explained than the same pollutant in Alcornocales station. On the other hand, ANNs produced better results than linear models which means that nonlinear models fit best the data. A cross- validation procedure has been applied in order to assure the generalization capabilities of the tested models. The results showed that in Algeciras a more reliable estimation could be done reaching a correlation estimation between the model and the target (real) values of SO2. This fact highlights the major influence of maritime transport in the Bay of Algeciras.