We have a new thing to be worried about for our health: Ozone.
Hey guys, here’s this week’s edition of the Spatial Edge — a weekly round-up of geospatial news that you can digest quicker than you can say ‘dihedral corner reflector scattering’. The aim is to make you a better geospatial data scientist in less than 5 minutes a week.
In today’s newsletter:
Just as we found out that last year was the hottest year on record, **a new study published in Nature Communications has found that ozone pollution is now more ubiquitous than a Starbucks cafe.** In short, the paper argues that the impact of ozone air pollution on health has been massively under-reported.
The researchers introduce a geo-ensemble learning model to estimate daily ozone levels at a 5km resolution, with a particular focus on short-term and long-term population exposure and mortality risks.
They combine high-resolution satellite data from TROPOMI (for nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde), meteorological and chemical information from ERA5 and CAMS, and over 7000 in-situ monitoring stations worldwide.
The findings?
The bottom line is that ozone-linked deaths are higher than what was found in earlier studies, which had been mainly limited to examining respiratory conditions. This is particularly evident in mid-latitude Asia and parts of the western United States, where the greatest mortality burden is observed.