Public health risks arising from airborne pollutants, e.g., Total Suspended Particulate (TSP) matter, can significantly elevate ongoing and future healthcare costs. The chaotic behaviour of air pollutants posing major difficulties in tracking their three-dimensional movements over diverse temporal domains is a significant challenge in designing practical air quality systems. This research paper builds a deep learning hybrid CLSTM model where convolutional neural network (CNN) is amalgamed with the long short-term memory (LSTM) network to forecast hourly TSP. The CNN model entails a data processer including feature extractors that draw upon statistically significant antecedent lagged predictor variables, whereas the LSTM model encapsulates a new feature mapping scheme to predict the next hourly TSP value. The hybrid CLSTM model is comprehensively benchmarked and is seen to outperform an ensemble of five machine learning models. The efficacy of the CLSTM model is elucidated in model testing phase at study sites in Queensland, Australia. Using performance metrics, visual analysis of TSP simulations relative to observations, and detailed error analysis, this study ascertains the CLSTM model’s practical utility for air pollutant forecasting systems in health risk mitigation. This study captures a feasible opportunity to emulate air quality at relatively high temporal resolutions in global regions where air pollution is a considerable threat to public health.

Wheat dominates the Australian grain production market and accounts for 10–15% of the world’s 100 million tonnes annual global wheat trade. Accurate wheat yield prediction is critical to satisfying local consumption and increasing exports regionally and globally to meet human food security. This paper incorporates remote satellite-based information in a wheat-growing region in South Australia to estimate the yield by integrating the kernel ridge regression (KRR) method coupled with complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) and the grey wolf optimisation (GWO). The hybrid model, ‘GWO-CEEMDAN-KRR,’ employing an initial pool of 23 different satellite-based predictors, is seen to outperform all the benchmark models and all the feature selection (ant colony, atom search, and particle swarm optimisation) methods that are implemented using a set of carefully screened satellite variables and a feature decomposition or CEEMDAN approach. A suite of statistical metrics and infographics comparing the predicted and measured yield shows a model prediction error that can be reduced by ~20% by employing the proposed GWO-CEEMDAN-KRR model. With the metrics verifying the accuracy of simulations, we also show that it is possible to optimise the wheat yield to achieve agricultural profits by quantifying and including the effects of satellite variables on potential yield. With further improvements in the proposed methodology, the GWO-CEEMDAN-KRR model can be adopted in agricultural yield simulation that requires remote sensing data to establish the relationships between crop health, yield, and other productivity features to support precision agriculture.