Finding Qualitative Patterns in Ozone Behavior

Air pollution is one of the most important environmental problems in urban areas, being extremely critical in Mexico City. The main air pollution problem that has been identified in Mexico City metropolitan area is the formation of photochemical smog, primarily ozone. This toxic gas can produce harmful effects on the population´s health, especially children´s health. The study and developement of modeling methodologies that allow the capturing of time series behavior becomes an important task when it is intended to predict the future behavior of the system under study. This paper presents the Visual-FIR tool, a new platform for the Fuzzy Inductive Reasoning (FIR) methodology. FIR offers a model-based approach to modeling and predicting either univariate or multivariate time series. Visual-FIR is used in this research for long term prediction of maximum ozone concentration in the centre region of Mexico City metropolitan area.