Evaluating Air Pollution Inequality Using High-Resolution Nitrogen Dioxide Observations
Abstract
Air pollution concentrations vary at fine spatiotemporal scales and disproportionately burden low-income communities of color in U.S. cities. Air quality monitoring has lacked the spatial and/or temporal resolution required to resolve steep atmospheric gradients and drive decision-making, particularly for reactive trace gases such as nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Longtime averages enhance the spatial detail in ground-based networks and coarse satellite observations, but smooth across temporal variability, which is important for air quality health assessments and is also informative of source patterns. We use novel high spatial resolution airborne spectrometer NO2 measurements (250 m x 500 m) and data from the recently-launched TROPOMI instrument (3.5 km x 7 km) onboard the Sentinel-5P satellite to evaluate urban NO2 inequality as a function of race, ethnicity, and income. We demonstrate that TROPOMI captures equivalent relative NO2 differences compared to higher spatial resolution sub-orbital data. We show that while time-averaged NO2 inequalities represent the sign of neighborhood-level disparities, time-of-day and day-to-day variability is substantial. We interpret temporal variability in one year of TROPOMI observations to infer the contribution of diesel trucking to NO2 inequality and to derive the NO2 dependence of NO2 lifetime along inter-neighborhood gradients.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.A44E..06D
- Keywords:
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- 0322 Constituent sources and sinks;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0345 Pollution: urban and regional;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE