Atmospheric pollution in the ten most populated US cities. Evidence of persistence

Abstract

The degree of persistence in daily PM25 and O3 in the ten most populated US cities, namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas and San Jose is examined in this work. We employ a methodology based on fractional integration, using the order of integration as a measure of the degree of persistence. Using data for the time period from January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2020, our results indicate that fractional integration and long memory features are both present in all the examined cases, with the integration order of the series being constrained in the (0, 1) interval. Based on this, the estimation of the coefficients for the time trend produces results which are substantially different from those obtained under the I(0) assumption.