COVID-19 lockdown: what is the effect on your city’s air quality?
A quick tutorial to create air quality maps and understanding the evolution of NO2… using satellite data.
How has lockdown impacted your city or your country? Follow the step-by-step instructions to understand the evolution of air quality throughout lockdown measures using a free online tool, launched by ESA and the European Commission.
Step 1 — First things first! Open the tool.
Visit the site: race.esa.int. This free platform consists of a dashboard with several indicators (related to air, land, water, economy and agriculture) monitored using satellite data. You will find more information about RACE at the end of the tutorial.
Step 2 — Select the ‘Air Quality’ indicator
Select the ‘Air Quality’ indicator (you can find it via the left panel or clicking directly on the ‘Global Indicators’ button as shown in the picture). A map of the tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) will then appear on the data visualization panel on the right. NO2 data was measured by the TROPOMI instrument on-board Copernicus Sentinel-5P. NO2 is a gaseous air pollutant belonging to the group of gases called nitrogen oxides (NOX), and it forms when fossil fuels are burned at high temperatures. While NOX are harmful to human health, NO2 is of particular concern — as long-term exposure to it is linked to respiratory diseases and mortality. NO2 is also linked to impacts on lakes and forests, since it interacts with water, oxygen and other chemicals present in the atmosphere, resulting in the acidification of rain.
Step 3 — Draw your area of interest
For an easier exploration, enlarge the map (upper left button of the data visualization panel). Under the zoom buttons, click on the polygons and draw a polygon over your area of interest.
Step 4 — Understand the evolution over time
Upon selecting your area of interest, you can draw a chart to see the concentration of NO2 in a graphic, and embed online:
Another solution is to visually compare the NO2 maps from different dates, side-by-side.
Step 5 — …share your results!
Sharing is caring. The coronavirus (COVID-19) has been spreading rapidly across the world and has been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation. In order to curb the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak, countries across the world have been implementing various social distancing measures restricting people’s movements by placing cities and even entire countries on lockdown, affecting for instance industry emissions, resulting (in some cases) in a significant drop in NO2 concentrations.
What is your city’s, country’s or region’s status, considering NO2 concentrations? Is there a noticeable drop in this gas when comparing a lockdown period to the same period of time during 2019? Is the second lockdown showing the same reduction of NO2 than during the first lockdown? Let us know! Share your results with @EO_OPEN_SCIENCE!
…and what about CO2?
If you are curious to know more about green house gases like carbon dioxide, you can visit the ‘twin’ platform of RACE, called the Earth Observing dashboard (you can visit it at eodashboard.org). This tri-agency dashboard is brought together by a joint cooperation between NASA, ESA and JAXA and it also provides CO2 concentration maps acquired by the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite and Japan’s Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT).
More on the Rapid Action on coronavirus Earth observation ‘RACE’ dashboard
The Rapid Action coronavirus and Earth observation — or RACE is an online platform that allows anyone to access data collected from satellites and understand the impacts on societal and economic changes driven by the coronavirus pandemic.This initiative is the result of the Joint cooperation between ESA and the European Commission.
