trajLevel: Trajectory level plots with conditioning

In openair: Tools for the Analysis of Air Pollution Data

Trajectory level plots with conditioning

Description

This function plots gridded back trajectories. This function requires that data are imported using the importTraj() function.

Usage

trajLevel(
  mydata,
  lon = "lon",
  lat = "lat",
  pollutant = "height",
  type = "default",
  smooth = FALSE,
  statistic = "frequency",
  percentile = 90,
  lon.inc = 1,
  lat.inc = lon.inc,
  min.bin = 1,
  .combine = NULL,
  sigma = 1.5,
  cols = "default",
  crs = 4326,
  map = TRUE,
  map.fill = TRUE,
  map.cols = "grey40",
  map.border = "black",
  map.alpha = 0.3,
  map.lwd = 1,
  map.lty = 1,
  grid.col = "deepskyblue",
  grid.nx = 9,
  grid.ny = grid.nx,
  origin = TRUE,
  key.title = NULL,
  key.position = "right",
  key.columns = NULL,
  strip.position = "top",
  auto.text = TRUE,
  plot = TRUE,
  key = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

mydata	Data frame, the result of importing a trajectory file using importTraj().
lon, lat	Columns containing the decimal longitude and latitude.
pollutant	Pollutant (or any numeric column) to be plotted, if any. Alternatively, use group.
type	Character string(s) defining how data should be split/conditioned before plotting. "default" produces a single panel using the entire dataset. Any other options will split the plot into different panels - a roughly square grid of panels if one type is given, or a 2D matrix of panels if two types are given. type is always passed to cutData(), and can therefore be any of: A built-in type defined in cutData() (e.g., "season", "year", "weekday", etc.). For example, type = "season" will split the plot into four panels, one for each season. The name of a numeric column in mydata, which will be split into n.levels quantiles (defaulting to 4). The name of a character or factor column in mydata, which will be used as-is. Commonly this could be a variable like "site" to ensure data from different monitoring sites are handled and presented separately. It could equally be any arbitrary column created by the user (e.g., whether a nearby possible pollutant source is active or not). Most openair plotting functions can take two type arguments. If two are given, the first is used for the columns and the second for the rows.
smooth	Should the trajectory surface be smoothed?
statistic	One of: "frequency" (the default) shows trajectory frequencies. "hexbin", which is similar to "frequency" but shows a hexagonal grid of counts. "difference" - in this case trajectories where the associated concentration is greater than percentile are compared with the the full set of trajectories to understand the differences in frequencies of the origin of air masses. The comparison is made by comparing the percentage change in gridded frequencies. For example, such a plot could show that the top 10\ to the east. "pscf" for a Potential Source Contribution Function map. This statistic method interacts with percentile. "cwt" for concentration weighted trajectories. "sqtba" to undertake Simplified Quantitative Transport Bias Analysis. This statistic method interacts with .combine and sigma.
percentile	The percentile concentration of pollutant against which the all trajectories are compared.
lon.inc, lat.inc	The longitude and latitude intervals to be used for binning data. If statistic = "hexbin", the minimum value out of of lon.inc and lat.inc is passed to the binwidth argument of ggplot2::geom_hex().
min.bin	The minimum number of unique points in a grid cell. Counts below min.bin are set as missing.
.combine	When statistic is "SQTBA" it is possible to combine lots of receptor locations to derive a single map. .combine identifies the column that differentiates different sites (commonly a column named "site"). Note that individual site maps are normalised first by dividing by their mean value.
sigma	For the SQTBA approach sigma determines the amount of back trajectory spread based on the Gaussian plume equation. Values in the literature suggest 5.4 km after one hour. However, testing suggests lower values reveal source regions more effectively while not introducing too much noise.
cols	Colours to use for plotting. Can be a pre-set palette (e.g., "turbo", "viridis", "tol", "Dark2", etc.) or a user-defined vector of R colours (e.g., c("yellow", "green", "blue", "black") - see colours() for a full list) or hex-codes (e.g., c("#30123B", "#9CF649", "#7A0403")). See openColours() for more details.
crs	The coordinate reference system to use for plotting. Defaults to 4326, which is the WGS84 geographic coordinate system, the standard, unprojected latitude/longitude system used in GPS, Google Earth, and GIS mapping. Other crs values are available - for example, 27700 will use the the OSGB36/British National Grid.
map	Should a base map be drawn? If TRUE the world base map provided by ggplot2::map_data() will be used.
map.fill	Should the base map be a filled polygon? Default is to fill countries.
map.cols	If map.fill = TRUE map.cols controls the fill colour. Examples include map.fill = "grey40" and map.fill = openColours("default", 10). The latter colours the countries and can help differentiate them.
map.border	The colour to use for the map outlines/borders. Defaults to "black".
map.alpha	The transparency level of the filled map which takes values from 0 (full transparency) to 1 (full opacity). Setting it below 1 can help view trajectories, trajectory surfaces etc. and a filled base map.
map.lwd	The map line width, a positive number, defaulting to 1.
map.lty	The map line type. Line types can either be specified as an integer (0 = blank, 1 = solid (default), 2 = dashed, 3 = dotted, 4 = dotdash, 5 = longdash, 6 = twodash) or as one of the character strings "blank", "solid", "dashed", "dotted", "dotdash", "longdash", or "twodash", where "blank" uses 'invisible lines' (i.e., does not draw them).
grid.col	The colour of the map grid to be used. To remove the grid set grid.col = "transparent".
grid.nx, grid.ny	The approximate number of ticks to draw on the map grid. grid.nx defaults to 9, and grid.ny defaults to whatever value is passed to grid.nx. Setting both values to 0 will remove the grid entirely. The number of ticks is approximate as this value is passed to scales::breaks_pretty() to determine nice-looking, round breakpoints.
origin	If true a filled circle dot is shown to mark the receptor point.
key.title	Used to set the title of the legend. The legend title is passed to quickText() if auto.text = TRUE.
key.position	Location where the legend is to be placed. Allowed arguments include "top", "right", "bottom", "left" and "none", the last of which removes the legend entirely.
key.columns	Number of columns to be used in a categorical legend. With many categories a single column can make to key too wide. The user can thus choose to use several columns by setting key.columns to be less than the number of categories.
strip.position	Location where the facet 'strips' are located when using type. When one type is provided, can be one of "left", "right", "bottom" or "top". When two types are provided, this argument defines whether the strips are "switched" and can take either "x", "y", or "both". For example, "x" will switch the 'top' strip locations to the bottom of the plot.
auto.text	Either TRUE (default) or FALSE. If TRUE titles and axis labels will automatically try and format pollutant names and units properly, e.g., by subscripting the "2" in "NO2". Passed to quickText().
plot	When openair plots are created they are automatically printed to the active graphics device. plot = FALSE deactivates this behaviour. This may be useful when the plot data is of more interest, or the plot is required to appear later (e.g., later in a Quarto document, or to be saved to a file).
key	Deprecated; please use key.position. If FALSE, sets key.position to "none".
...	Addition options are passed on to cutData() for type handling. Some additional arguments are also available: xlab, ylab and main override the x-axis label, y-axis label, and plot title. layout sets the layout of facets - e.g., layout(2, 5) will have 2 columns and 5 rows. fontsize overrides the overall font size of the plot. border sets the border colour of each tile.

Details

An alternative way of showing the trajectories compared with plotting trajectory lines is to bin the points into latitude/longitude intervals. For these purposes trajLevel() should be used. There are several trajectory statistics that can be plotted as gridded surfaces. First, statistic can be set to "frequency" to show the number of back trajectory points in a grid square. Grid squares are by default at 1 degree intervals, controlled by lat.inc and lon.inc. Such plots are useful for showing the frequency of air mass locations. Note that it is also possible to set statistic = "hexbin" for plotting frequencies (not concentrations), which will produce a plot by hexagonal binning.

If statistic = "difference" the trajectories associated with a concentration greater than percentile are compared with the the full set of trajectories to understand the differences in frequencies of the origin of air masses of the highest concentration trajectories compared with the trajectories on average. The comparison is made by comparing the percentage change in gridded frequencies. For example, such a plot could show that the top 10\ the east.

If statistic = "pscf" then the Potential Source Contribution Function is plotted. The PSCF calculates the probability that a source is located at latitude i and longitude j (Pekney et al., 2006).The basis of PSCF is that if a source is located at (i,j), an air parcel back trajectory passing through that location indicates that material from the source can be collected and transported along the trajectory to the receptor site. PSCF solves

PSCF = m_{ij}/n_{ij}

where n_{ij} is the number of times that the trajectories passed through the cell (i,j) and m_{ij} is the number of times that a source concentration was high when the trajectories passed through the cell (i,j). The criterion for determining m_{ij} is controlled by percentile, which by default is 90. Note also that cells with few data have a weighting factor applied to reduce their effect.

A limitation of the PSCF method is that grid cells can have the same PSCF value when sample concentrations are either only slightly higher or much higher than the criterion. As a result, it can be difficult to distinguish moderate sources from strong ones. Seibert et al. (1994) computed concentration fields to identify source areas of pollutants. The Concentration Weighted Trajectory (CWT) approach considers the concentration of a species together with its residence time in a grid cell. The CWT approach has been shown to yield similar results to the PSCF approach. The openair manual has more details and examples of these approaches.

A further useful refinement is to smooth the resulting surface, which is possible by setting smooth = TRUE.

Value

an openair object

Author(s)

David Carslaw

Jack Davison

References

Pekney, N. J., Davidson, C. I., Zhou, L., & Hopke, P. K. (2006). Application of PSCF and CPF to PMF-Modeled Sources of PM 2.5 in Pittsburgh. Aerosol Science and Technology, 40(10), 952-961.

Seibert, P., Kromp-Kolb, H., Baltensperger, U., Jost, D., 1994. Trajectory analysis of high-alpine air pollution data. NATO Challenges of Modern Society 18, 595-595.

Xie, Y., & Berkowitz, C. M. (2007). The use of conditional probability functions and potential source contribution functions to identify source regions and advection pathways of hydrocarbon emissions in Houston, Texas. Atmospheric Environment, 41(28), 5831-5847.

See Also

Other trajectory analysis functions: importTraj(), trajCluster(), trajPlot()

Examples

# show a simple case with no pollutant i.e. just the trajectories
# let's check to see where the trajectories were coming from when
# Heathrow Airport was closed due to the Icelandic volcanic eruption
# 15--21 April 2010.
# import trajectories for London and plot
## Not run: 
lond <- importTraj("london", 2010)

## End(Not run)
# more examples to follow linking with concentration measurements...

# import some measurements from KC1 - London
## Not run: 
kc1 <- importAURN("kc1", year = 2010)
# now merge with trajectory data by 'date'
lond <- merge(lond, kc1, by = "date")

# trajectory plot, no smoothing - and limit lat/lon area of interest
# use PSCF
trajLevel(subset(lond, lat > 40 & lat < 70 & lon > -20 & lon < 20),
  pollutant = "pm10", statistic = "pscf"
)

# can smooth surface, suing CWT approach:
trajLevel(subset(lond, lat > 40 & lat < 70 & lon > -20 & lon < 20),
  pollutant = "pm2.5", statistic = "cwt", smooth = TRUE
)

# plot by season:
trajLevel(subset(lond, lat > 40 & lat < 70 & lon > -20 & lon < 20),
  pollutant = "pm2.5",
  statistic = "pscf", type = "season"
)

## End(Not run)

openair documentation built on April 2, 2026, 9:07 a.m.