IS428 AY2018-19T1 Low Yun Vera

Problem & Motivation

Air pollution is an important risk factor for health in Europe and worldwide. A recent review of the global burden of disease showed that it is one of the top ten risk factors for health globally. Worldwide an estimated 7 million people died prematurely because of pollution; in the European Union (EU) 400,000 people suffer a premature death. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) predicts that in 2050 outdoor air pollution will be the top cause of environmentally related deaths worldwide. In addition, air pollution has also been classified as the leading environmental cause of cancer.

Air quality in Bulgaria is a big concern: measurements show that citizens all over the country breathe in air that is considered harmful to health. For example, concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10 are much higher than what the EU and the World Health Organization (WHO) have set to protect health.

Bulgaria had the highest PM2.5 concentrations of all EU-28 member states in urban areas over a three-year average. For PM10, Bulgaria is also leading on the top polluted countries with 77 μg/m3on the daily mean concentration (EU limit value is 50 μg/m3).

According to the WHO, 60 percent of the urban population in Bulgaria is exposed to dangerous (unhealthy) levels of particulate matter (PM10).

Dataset Analysis & Transformation Process

This section will elaborate on the exploratory data analysis and transformation process for each dataset to prepare the data for analysis. There are 4 different Zip Files that were provided to us in the assignment. The files provided to us are Air Tube, EEA Data, METEO-data and TOPO-DATA.

Air Tube

Issue : In this data set the geographical location given is in a geohash format.

Solution : In order to retrieve the latitude and longitude of the location, the use of a python geohash2 library is needed to decode the geohash.

References

https://github.com/DBarthe/geohash