Awards & Nominations
NO to NO2 has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Where There’s a Link, There’s a Way
Tropospheric NO2 and Covid-19 Mortality Rates
Summary
Long time exposure to NO2 in the air has been linked to various respiratory diseases. Our team investigated the link between tropospheric NO2 exposure and COVID-related death percentages. We used NO2 Satellite data to show the correlation between tropospheric NO2 levels and coronavirus death percentages in the United States and Italy. We generated recommendations for governments and policy-makers, and we created possible social challenges for the people, aiming to increase public awareness.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Coronavirus pandemic put the world to both health and socio-economic challenges. Every country's policymakers struggle to find a balance between the health and economic risks associated with the coronavirus spread and its impacts. Allocation of human, health, and financial resources to the appropriate place at the appropriate time is crucial for countries, as they try to minimize health risks to their citizens, without severely degrading their economies. As we found a strong correlation between the tropospheric NO2 level and fatality rates due to coronavirus, policymakers can use our findings to put forth social-distancing measures appropriate to the risk in their regions. Also, they can use our results to start thinking about the necessary future changes in urban planning and industrial developments to avoid serious complications the next time respiratory illness such as coronavirus spreads. We decided to include members of society in the process of this problem-solving by offering them the challenges, which will allow them to be more informed and take their actions to contribute to the global ecological change, as well as to take more care of their own health.
How We Developed This Project
We used NASA's satellite data (OMNO2d) to determine one year's average tropospheric NO2 levels in 2019, then wrote MATLAB code to correlate the satellite data with the United States and Italy's coronavirus data. We found a strong correlation between the NO2 level in the troposphere and death percentage in the US and Italy's regions. Even though for the US we had coronavirus cases and deaths data for every settlement, for Italy we only obtained such data for Italy's regions. We were unable to find coronavirus data with as much spatial resolution as in the case of the US for other countries. For future studies obtaining and analyzing such data is crucial. Using Adobe CC and the Weebly website builder (Neustar offer) we developed a website prototype notono2.co
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
- NO2 Satellite Data: Nickolay A. Krotkov, Lok N. Lamsal, Sergey V. Marchenko, Edward A. Celarier, Eric J.Bucsela, William H. Swartz, Joanna Joiner and the OMI core team (2019), OMI/Aura NO2 Cloud-Screened Total and Tropospheric Column L3 Global Gridded 0.25 degree x 0.25 degree V3, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), Accessed: [5/31/2020], 10.5067/Aura/OMI/DATA3007
- US Coronavirus Data:https://github.com/datasets/covid-19/tree/master/data
- Italy Coronavirus Data:https://github.com/pcm-dpc/
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