NASA Images Show Human Fingerprint on Global Air Quality – Release Materials
This video provides an overview of the study findings. An HD version of this video is available here: Human Fingerprint on Global Air Quality
Scientists examined observations made from 2005 to 2014 by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument aboard NASA's Aura satellite. One of the atmospheric gases the instrument detects is nitrogen dioxide, a yellow-brown gas that is a common emission from cars, power plants and industrial activity. Nitrogen dioxide can quickly transform into ground-level ozone, a major respiratory pollutant in urban smog. Nitrogen dioxide hotspots, used as an indicator of general air quality, occur over most major cities in developed and developing nations.
The following visualizations include two types of data. The absolute concentrations show the concentration of tropospheric nitrogen dioxide, with blue and green colors denoting lower concentrations and orange and red areas indicating higher concentrations.
The second type of data is the trend data from 2005 to 2014, which shows the observed change in concentration over the ten-year period. Blue indicated an observed decrease in nitrogen dioxide, and orange indicates an observed increase. Please note that the range on the color bars (text is in white) changes from location to location in order to highlight features seen in the different geographic regions.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Animator
- Trent L. Schindler (USRA)
Writer
- Ellen T. Gray (NASA/HQ)
Scientists
- Bryan Duncan (NASA/GSFC)
- Lok Lamsal (USRA)
Producer
- Kayvon Sharghi (USRA)
Datasets used in this visualization
Aura (Collected with the OMI sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.