In order to address the challenge, we analyzed carbon emissions data throughout the world. During quarantine, there has been a massive reduction in human traffic in areas all over the globe, which has led to a decrease in pollution. We observed this by analyzing carbon emissions throughout the spring of 2020 in conjunction with carbon emissions throughout the spring of 2019 and noticed a significant decrease in these emissions throughout the spring 2020. Once we discovered this overall correlation by examining global data, we narrowed our focus to our local reservation in order to determine how pollution has been affected in an area that was already protected, prior to COVID-19. Because there are no available data sets with carbon emissions measurements for our local reservation, we designed an experiment that we plan to perform on a weekly basis as our local area slowly transitions out of quarantine and normal human traffic begins to resume. We described our experiment on our website and plan to post our data to the site as we collect it to track how quarantine continues to affect local carbon emissions. We will also note the stages of reopening that cause the most significant impacts on local emissions and use our data to inform guidelines that we will propose to help preserve the quarantine practices that keep carbon emissions low.
At first, we weren’t sure which part of the environment we were going to examine when looking at the effects of COVID-19. However, after looking through the data made available by NASA, we decided that looking at different levels of carbon emissions would be best. Initially we wanted to examine varying levels of CO2 from 2019 to 2020, but we ended up choosing to study CO levels instead because the data was more readily available and because we found that CO was a great indicator of pollution in the troposphere. We decided to look into the graphs that provided information on CO levels, giving a closer look to places that contained hotspots of COVID-19, focusing on North America and Asia. But we also wanted to go back to our original plan of measuring CO2 levels, so we devised an experiment to further our studies, focusing on our community by measuring CO2 levels at the reservation. We were able to find a clear correlation between COVID-19 and CO levels, and we expect to find something similar in our experiment about CO2 levels during COVID-19.