- NO2: Whether nitrogen dioxide is rained down as nitric acid or inhaled as a brownish gas, this pollutant causes tissue damage and interferes with your hemoglobin's ability to bind oxygen.
- SO2: Sulfur dioxide causes inflammation and tissue damage. It dissolves in water as the main component of acid rain, which mobilizes metals usually bound in the soil.
- O3: When inhaled, ozone wrecks havoc on human tissue and damages DNA.
- PM2.5 and PM10: PM stands for 'Particulate Matter.' These fine particles suspended in the air can deposit metals and polyaromatic hydrocarbons in your lungs.
- BaP: Benzo(a) pyrene is a persistent organic pollutant that causes tissue irritation. It is rated by IARC as a probable carcinogen.
Play around with the interactive visualizations below to get a sense of how these pollutants vary from location to location, and how they are spread across the EU!
Let's see if measurements were higher near vehicle traffic, or if their concentration varies between urban and suburban areas. The graph below displays the spread of measurements taken -- a taller bar means more measurements were close to that value on the x-axis. The vertical lines mark the average value.
Next up is an interactive map! The default setting simply shows a color gradient of least-to-greatest within the measurements. "Normalize to Limit" lets you compare measurements to the relevant health standard for that pollutant. When normalized to the limit, 'dark green' countries are under the limit, and the color gradient from there shows you how badly the limit is exceeded.
These Shiny apps were coded by Team Pollute, my group for UCSB's Bren School Winter 2016 Informatics course. They update directly from the data file stored on the server, which is dang cool! It means you can update the data and this visualization will reflect the new data. Nifty!
Data is from the EU Urban and Large City Audit Project's 2013 dataset.
No comments:
Post a Comment