Online Program
Analysis and Comparison of Air Pollutants in Wuhan, China
*zihao zhang, Brown University Keywords: Air pollution, spatio-temporal distribution Air pollution is a major risk to public health worldwide. The situation is particularly dire in China, where the PM2.5 index in major cities is often 10 times higher than that in New York City. We applied a web crawler tool to automatically collect a daily air pollution report from the government environment website of Wuhan, China, including Air Quality Index (AQI) of five major pollutants in 11 stations from 2013 to 2015. Our analysis confirms that all five pollutants have apparent seasonal trend and high daily variance. PM2.5, NO2, SO2, and CO remain at a higher level and larger variance in the winter, while O3 has a higher mean and larger variance in the summer. SO2, NO2, and CO remain significantly lower in rural areas, while PM2.5 concentration did not appear to vary significantly between stations. Our immediate plan is to disseminate the tool for data visualization to the general public to further increase the awareness of air pollution risk. Our long-term goal is to investigate the relationship between the concentration of specific air pollutant with human behavior and health risks.
|