ISSS608 2018-19 T1 Assign Debbie Siah Mei Ping
Sofia City - Air Quality Analysis
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Contents
Background
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. In this assignment, students are required to use visual analytics approach to reveal spatio-temporal patterns of air quality in Sofia City and to identify issues of concern.
Task 1: Spatio-temporal Analysis of Official Air Quality
Characterize the past and most recent situation with respect to air quality measures in Sofia City. What does a typical day look like for Sofia city? Do you see any trends of possible interest in this investigation? What anomalies do you find in the official air quality dataset? How do these affect your analysis of potential problems to the environment?
Task 2: Spatio-temporal Analysis of Citizen Science Air Quality Measurements
Using appropriate data visualisation, you are required will be asked to answer the following types of questions:
- Characterize the sensors’ coverage, performance and operation. Are they well distributed over the entire city? Are they all working properly at all times? Can you detect any unexpected behaviors of the sensors through analyzing the readings they capture?
- Now turn your attention to the air pollution measurements themselves. Which part of the city shows relatively higher readings than others? Are these differences time dependent?
Task 3: Explore other factors affecting air quality in Sofia City
Urban air pollution is a complex issue. There are many factors affecting the air quality of a city. Some of the possible causes are:
- Local energy sources. For example, according to Unmask My City (http://unmaskmycity.org/project/sofia/), a global initiative by doctors, nurses, public health practitioners, and allied health professionals dedicated to improving air quality and reducing emissions in our cities, Bulgaria’s main sources of PM10, and fine particle pollution PM2.5 (particles 2.5 microns or smaller) are household burning of fossil fuels or biomass, and transport.
- Local meteorology such as temperature, pressure, rainfall, humidity, wind etc
- Local topography
- Complex interactions between local topography and meteorological characteristics.
- Transboundary pollution for example the haze that intruded into Singapore from our neighbours.
In this third task, you are required to reveal the relationships between the factors mentioned above and the air quality measure detected in Task 1 and Task 2.
Dataset
Four major data sets in zipped file format are provided for this assignment:
I. Official air quality measurements (EEA Data.zip)
ii. Citizen science air quality measurements (Air Tube.zip): temperature, humidity, pressure and topography
iii. Meteorological measurements (METEO-data.zip): Temperature, Humidity, Wind speed, Pressure, Rainfall, Visibility
iv. Topography data (TOPO-DATA)
Visualisation Tools
Tableau 10.5
JMP Pro
R
Credit
I worked on this assignment together with Lee Yeng Ling on the conceptual, implementation and computer-related issues. The Tableau workbook and Wiki writeup are undertaken as individual work.
