High Resolution Mapping of Exposure to Urban Air Pollution

Determining human exposure to air pollutants and its impact on human health is one of the most challenging tasks for environmental scientists and public health practitioners. This is largely due to high variability of pollutants composition and concentrations, both temporally and spatially, as well as highly varying patterns of human mobility. High resolution data on individual exposure to pollution has been unattainable. This is in part due to limitations of stationary, central site, monitoring programs, as well as lack of information about the mobility of exposed individuals. The impact of pollutants on human health has been estimated on aggregate levels, while pollutant levels have been derived from fixed monitoring stations, with limited spatial coverage. Fixed and sparsely placed data collectors do not accurately reflect the differences in air quality of an industrial neighborhood or a high density residential area, as compared to more suburban or rural areas. Studies that measure specific air pollution levels, such as the ones measuring vehicular traffic pollution in the south Bronx NY, have correlated the extraordinarily high levels of asthma in school children to the localized air quality. Here we present the results of a campaign measuring air parameters in five boroughs of NYC aggregated over seasons. The higher temporally resolved (hourly) measurements from fewer number of sites is used to create hourly map of the city at 300 meter spatial resolution. This information is then mapped against asthma records and mobility data for better understanding of the impact of the exposure to individual.