YingYuMingZi| Quiet Planet

Quiet Planet

The COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting social distancing recommendations and related restrictions have led to numerous short-term changes in economic and social activity around the world, all of which may have impacts on our environment. Your challenge is to use space-based data to document the local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19 and the associated societal responses.

Comparative analysis of SARS and COVID-19 in Wuhan: Changes of vegetation using surface reflectance

Summary

During the COVID-19 pandemic, in China, Wuhan has experienced a complete lock-down. We assume that the lock-down and the numerous short-term changes in social activity may have some impact on the environment, especially the urban ecosystem. To get more hint about how a pandemic and its social causes can impact the environment, and recalling that in 2003 Wuhan has also been impacted by SARS, we compared the changes in the vegetation in Wuhan before and after the breakout of both SARS and COVID-19. We used the surface reflectance data within the green light band from the MOD09A1 dataset. Our results have shown some significant relation between the breakouts and surface reflectance changes.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We used the data of surface reflectance within the green light band from 2002-2003 during the SARS period and 2019-2020 during the current COVID-19  pandemic. We compared the change in vegetation before and after the virus breakouts, by which we then analyzed the impact on the vegetation due to the pandemics and the related numerous short-term changes in economic and social activity. This effectively addressed the challenge of using space-based data to document the environmental changes caused by the pandemics.

How We Developed This Project

From the NASA EARTHDATA database, we found that there is a timeline that can track the surface reflectance data back to 2002 and 2003. So, we started to think about a similar challenge in 2003--the SARS pandemic in China. As the breakout point of COVID-19, we chose Wuhan as the location to compare the differences between the breakouts of SARS and COVID-19. Considering the topic we choose, quiet planet, we'd like to analyze the environment changes, especially the vegetation coverage rate change. We found that the EARTHDATA datasets can allow us to get the data from a specific location. The data for the whole section is divided into a 2400*2400 grid, and the accuracy for each is 500 meters. We scaled the map by latitude and longitude to obtain the data for Wuhan. We chose four groups of data, April 2002 to compare with April 2002, and April 2019 with April 2020. We chose the data using HDFView , collected data using Excel, and ran the analysis using Mathematica. In the end, the number we have shows that the rate of the surface reflectance decreases during 2002-2003 is different from that during 2019-2020. However, we have discovered that: 

(1) The trends of the impacts from the two pandemics on the surface reflectance are similar 

(2) Prior to the outbreaks of the two pandemics, Wuhan implemented large-scale tree-planting and this can be demonstrated in the reflectance peaks seen in the last week of both datasets, such as the surface reflectance increase that resulted from massive tree-planting in March 2002 

(3) We can infer from the results that the two pandemics led to decrease in human intervention and conclude that human intervention in building a green environment is meaningful and detrimental

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Project Code
Data & Resources
Tags
#SARS, #COVID-19, #VEGETATION #SURFACE REFLECTANCE, #WUHAN, #REED COLLEGE
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.