Anecdotally (n=5) during the California/Oregon wildfires, indoor air quality is better, but not hugely better than airdoors. In a limited experiment, I found indoor pm2.5 levels to be around 2/3 of outside using a hand-held meter - housing in silicon valley is (generally) poorly built, insulated and with without A/C or HEPA filters.
Are there models that predict indoor quality? e.g.
h(indoor quality | outdoor quality, building parameters)
Given that wildfires are keeping the pm2.5 levels in the unhealthy ranges for up to a month a year, now I wonder whether the 'stay indoors' advice is enough.
There are many examples of the modelling efforts considering both indoor and outdoor air quality. Please kindly consult the following papers
Conference Paper Coupling multi-zone and CFD models for investigating indoor ...
Article Quantifying the impact of housing interventions on indoor ai...
https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2018/03/16/wang-2010-hvacr.pdf
https://europepmc.org/article/med/20041038#free-full-text
For more than twenty years, I am using program CONTAM to model indoor air quality in buildings. CONTAM is a shareware software developer and distributed by NIST. New version 3.4 was released in 2020.
I am sure that the software can be successfully used to model your problem.
From the introduction to the User Manual: „CONTAM is a multizone indoor air quality and ventilation analysis program designed to help determine airflows, contaminant concentrations, and occupant exposure in buildings. CONTAM can calculate infiltration and exfiltration airflows between interior zones of the building and the outdoors, room-to-room airflows, and ventilation system airflows. These airflows are the result of pressure differences resulting from driving forces which include mechanical ventilation system fans, wind pressures acting on the exterior of the building, and buoyancy effects induced by temperature differences between zones, including the outdoors. CONTAM can also calculate contaminant concentrations to account for the transport and fate of airborne contaminants due to airflow, chemical and radiochemical transformation, adsorption and desorption of building materials, filtration, and deposition to and resuspension from building surfaces.”
Link to the User Manual: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/TechnicalNotes/NIST.TN.1887r1.pdf
Link to the software download page: https://www.nist.gov/el/energy-and-environment-division-73200/nist-multizone-modeling/software
Hi Stuart,
I like your question and the answers by your commentators which refer to relevant literaturel.
If you wish to develop your own model, you have the likelihood h(.|.) you need a prior and then you can calculate the posterior distribution. Actually, you h(.|.) is a form of prior (qua-Bayesian) and thus you might want to do some more accurate testing by taking a random sample in specific rooms. Depending on the reasons for your work and the stakes that you might worry about, I think modeling by simple means is informative about local conditions and give a sense of what may be going on locally. In general, I would be interested in determining if there are personal meters, so you and others can carry them around the house, rather than relaying on averages. I also think that other risk factors may also be relevant (e.g, gases such as CO, CO2 and some measure if the chemicals on the particles such as B(a)P).
Hope that this is useful.
Best,
Paolo
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