The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Earth Science Division has funded new research projects aimed at examining how the global lockdowns, instituted by governments in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, are changing the environment.
The US federal agency responsible for aerospace research, aeronautics and the civilian space programme says it is enabling scientists to use information from its earth-observing satellites, on-the-ground sensors and computer-based datasets to study the environmental, economic and societal impacts of the pandemic.
Among the research under way is an initiative aimed at determining if COVID-19 cases could decrease in the US summer, and examining how COVID-19 travel bans and lockdown regulations are impacting air quality around airports.
“NASA has a unique role to play in response to this crisis,” says John Haynes, NASA’s programme manager for health and air quality applications.
“As we continue to collect earth-observing satellite data on a global scale, we can aid in the understanding of global changes resulting from the pandemic, as well as investigate potential environmental signals that may influence the spread of COVID-19.”
Changing seasons
Ben Zaitchik, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, is investigating whether COVID-19 cases will decline in the US summer.
“Although cases will likely decrease as we move into summer, we want to know how much of that change is due to social-distancing policies and lockdown orders versus higher temperatures and humidity,” he says.
Zaitchik’s COVID-19-focused research builds on his prior NASA-funded work studying how enteric infectious diseases spread. Enteric diseases, like cholera, are intestinal.
By applying earth satellite data to public health data related to COVID-19, Zaitchik will be able to determine if there are any significant links. For example, do cases decrease as temperature or humidity rises?
Zaitchik’s team is using data on temperature, precipitation, and other weather and climate information from a NASA dataset called Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2. Once they find any potential links between weather and COVID-19 cases, they’ll verify them with higher resolution satellite data.
Air traffic
In other research, US researchers Jennifer Kaiser from Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Elena Lind from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg are examining the pandemic’s impact on air quality related to reduced airport traffic. In collaboration with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, the researchers are creating maps and images that show how COVID-19 has reduced air pollution across the world.
Kaiser’s research is looking at how COVID-19 travel bans and lockdown orders are impacting air quality around airports. Current conditions create a unique opportunity to study airport-related pollutants, especially nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde. It’s a footprint that will likely gradually return to its former shape as travel policies are relaxed,according to NASA.
“People are looking at COVID-19 impacts and seeing better air quality with less traffic,” notes Kaiser.
“They might wonder if this is what the future could look like if we relied more heavily on electric vehicles than we do now. Yet, airplanes are not going to be electric anytime soon.”
Kaiser and her team installed two sensors at both Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI) and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. BWI’s overall traffic is down by around 60% and Atlanta’s is down by 70%.
The sensors, which are part of NASA’s Pandora Project, each use a spectrometer to identify chemicals in the air.
Fossil fuel emissions
Dr Bryan Duncan and Joanna Joiner from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre have embarked on an initiative to reveal how much nitrogen dioxide levels are in the air, on a global scale. Both work with data from the Dutch-Finnish Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) aboard NASA’s Aura satellite to help reveal how COVID-19 policies are impacting air quality.
“We’re looking at changes in nitrogen dioxide to understand how economies are changing,” Duncan explains.
“If the amount of pollution emitted continues to grow over time, your economy is likely booming, but pollution can decrease even as coal use remains the same because of improvements in efficiency and the implementation of emission control devices.”
Joiner and Duncan are developing different ways to present new information. They put together a comparison of data from this year to an average of data from the five previous years. Their team wants to know when changes in nitrogen dioxide begin relative to different government actions.
“The OMI team have decided to make this data accessible to scientists, economists and health professionals to help them understand how atmospheric chemistry is changing, how economies are shrinking and whether lockdowns are effective for specific areas,” concludes Duncan.
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