the remarkable one - Space Apps Challenge

the remarkable one | A One Health Approach

A One Health Approach

Air pollution is a major global environmental health risk, causing an estimated seven million deaths across the globe annually. Your challenge is to take an interdisciplinary approach, using both Earth science and health science, and integrate different types of datasets and applications to study the effects of air pollution.

One Health Approach - Air Pollution : The Past, Present and Future

Summary

Our project focused upon gathering and synthesising different types of datasets that we have researched in order to portray the Past, Present and how they eventually will impact the Future of Air Pollution. The government contains large amounts of quantitative data regarding the topic, however they have trouble conveying their data in a clear way that can be understood by the public. Thus this project was made under the goal of taking and observing this data and portraying them in a clear way that could be understood by the masses. Consequently raising awareness towards the effects of the problem.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We have created this project to collate the useful and important datasets and appliances and synthesize them to raise awareness and portray the worldwide problem and effects of Air Pollution to the masses. More explicitly, we wanted to demonstrate the positive trend in Air Pollution in the past (Political and Technological focus) and present (COVID-19) , and how this will affect our future. In this project we focused on indoor as well as outdoor pollution, as we believe that the problem must be tackled in a holistic manner rather than simply focusing on one aspect.

In the present, the COVID-19 crisis has brought about unforeseen socio-economic dislocations. However, we have used that to discover and formulate a better understanding between air quality and human health, as well as links between COVID 19 mitigation techniques and Air Pollution improvements.

Grasping upon the trends in data of Air Pollution and finding out why they occurred. Ultimately, we combined knowledge and trends from the past, trends due to COVID-19 and its mitigation techniques and formulated that they would be essential for the longevity of the dip in Air Pollution brought about by COVID-19. Using data, we were able to uncover the trends in the past decades of Air Pollution, correcting the popular sentiment that Air Pollution is getting worse with industrialization.

We hope that this project will not only raise awareness towards the fundamental problem of Air Pollution, but also shed light on the positives, and more explicitly what countries have been doing to combat this issue. This project will also demonstrate with you the success of our time, and what we have learnt in the past and the present, as well as how we should employ them for the future. Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis and the byproducts of its mitigation techniques has also left its mark on Air Pollution, which we want to convey with this presentation as well. Ultimately, we want to convey the effects of Air Pollution, the reforms that have been made against it and also what more can be done to ensure that this dip in Air Pollution is sustainable.

The past, present and future of this Earth has never been more important as we shift towards mass globalization and a technological age. However, as we do this, we must ensure that the environment and Earth which has long preceded us, remains beautiful and natural.

How We Developed This Project

We first looked through which projects and topics we were particularly interested in. We especially were keen to portray the usefulness of statistics, graphs and quantitative data in general, thus when we saw this project, we immediately were interested. Furthermore, space-based technologies have given birth to new methods of data reading, thus we were also interested in using them practically. Taking inspiration from the talk on Friday, we believed that the best way to portray our graphical analysis and research was through a webinar/video. Firstly, we divided our labour in order to look through all the recommended sources provided by NASA. Rather than handpicking data, we focused on mass collecting them and taking a note of all the important data. Afterwards, we created a general flowchart/outline for our presentation. This gave us a good idea on how we should structure the presentation and thus made it easier for us to create it. The presentation itself was not easy, as we had to synthesize all the data that we had used and combine the necessary ones into one presentation. However, once we were satisfied with the result. We began to write a script with all the key information and points we wanted to refer to in the actual video. This process took the entirety of the first day and the script writing was finished in the morning of Sunday. Afterwards, we began to record our sections and sent it over to the editor who would combine them into a video format.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

During the Division of labour process, we went through all the Space Agency data provided in the project. Each brought new insight towards the topic and reinforced as well introduced many new ideas and theories in our brains. Together, we integrated them all in order to study the effects of Air Pollution. For example, RADARSAT, SCISAT and MOPITT were all useful in finding common trends between data and providing us new opportunities to try out new types of datasets. NASA's public data further helped us via the Data Pathfinder website, which gave us data in a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF or (COG) format.