Background:

Air pollution is associated with almost 5 million annual deaths worldwide as well as harm to countless others through negative health impacts, from asthma and diabetes to cardiovascular disease and cancer. The World Bank estimates that air pollution costs the global economy $225 billion in lost labor income and $5 trillion in welfare losses annually.

Yet real-time, reliable air quality data are not available in most of the world, leaving people with a significant and harmful knowledge gap. Confusion about what air quality data mean is only growing as low-cost sensors enter the market, companies create their own predictive algorithms, privatized messaging on satellite data streams to mobile applications grows, and countries and companies come up with various ways to present the data, which may not be understood by users. Similar to the U.S. Department of State’s global air quality monitoring system, which has stimulated research and awareness around the world, a transparent model is needed to automatically synthesize data from the ground to satellites into actionable information for the public.

Resources:

Javascript and HTML were used for the web app interface and the source of the data was from NASA Earth Observations (NEO) WMS.

Web App Interface Prototype:

https://missionbreathoffreshair.github.io/

Challenges:

Using javascripting for the first time, and the limited execution time to acheive the goal of the challenge.