Predicting Surface Ozone Levels in Eastern Croatia: Leveraging Recurrent Fuzzy Neural Networks with Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm

Urban air pollution, a combination of industry, traffic, forest burning, and agriculture pollutants, significantly impacts human health, plants, and economic growth. Ozone exposure can lead to mortality, heart attacks, and lung damage, necessitating the creation of complex environmental safety regulations by forecasting ozone concentrations and associated pollutants. This study proposes a hybrid method, RFNN-GOA, combining recurrent fuzzy neural network (RFNN) and grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) to estimate and forecast the daily ozone (O\(_3\)) in specific urban areas, specifically Kopački Rit and Osijek city in Croatia, aiming to improve air quality, human health, and ecosystems. Due to the intricate structure of atmospheric particles, modeling of O\(_3\) likely poses the biggest challenge in air pollution today. The dataset used by the proposed RFNN-GOA model for the prediction of O\(_3\) concentrations in each explored area consists of the following air pollutants, NO, NO\(_2\), CO, SO\(_2\), O\(_3\), PM\(_{10}\), and PM\(_{2.5}\); and five meteorological elements, including temperature, relative humidity, wind direction, speed, and pressure. The RFNN-GOA method optimizes membership functions’ parameters and the rule premise, demonstrating robustness and reliability compared to other identifiers and indicating its superiority over competing methods. The RFNN-GOA method demonstrated superior accuracy in Osijek city and Kopački Rit area, with variance-accounted for (VAF) values of 91.135%, 83.676%, 87.807%, 79.673% compared to the RFNN method’s corresponding values of 85.682%, 80.687%, 80.808%, 74.202% in both training and testing phases, respectively. This reveals that RFNN-GOA increased the average VAF in Osijek city and Kopački Rit area by over 5% and 8%, respectively.