We thought we’d continue the data theme this week as it seems there are lots of people looking at and presenting air pollution data in different ways, with the overall aim of bringing it to life.
Are you Awair?
Our own Breathe London team, led by Andy Grieve, have just launched a new initiative called Awair. This includes highly visual displays showing local air pollution both on the day and the following day. Below is a photo after Louise took a ride to see one, along with the obligatory AirTracking of her ride. They can currently be found in Gipsy Hill, Peckham and White City. You can request additional locations via this form.
This more global look at air pollution has been getting a lot of coverage. Taking inspiration from visualisations of climate change, it shows changes in 176 cities over the past 174 years reflected in coloured lines. Sadly some cities such as Islamabad (highlighted in the summary) are getting worse and worse; while thankfully cities such as London are improving due to policy measures to limit emissions. They have caused some debate however, eg suggesting the blue zone could imply everything is fine, as Kayla Schulte argues, who is also behind the Awair project.
Lining up
Our own approach to visualising the London data at air-aware.org is now back up and running, as we’ve fixed our connection to the Breathe London servers. We took more of a raw data - interactively presented approach (which may have a proper name), rather than summarising in the ways described above. This might reflect our bias of wanting to see what’s under the story. For example, we can see that the Brixton node is still breaching WHO daily guidelines for nitrogen dioxide pretty much half of the time. And we spotted a pretty terrible PM2.5 (fine particulate matter) spike on 22 September - did people start wood burning then, we wonder?
Elsewhere in the Breathe London family, the Knitting the Air project has won an award! We are very proud of Caroline and Poplar HARCA, who we’ve featured before.
Worldly wise
What do we conclude from all this? There is a wealth of ways to present air pollution data - attempts to summarise (which will almost always annoy someone who doesn’t like what’s hidden as a result) through to presentation of raw data (which can be overwhelming). The masters of the art are probably the team at Our World in Data, which has a treasure trove of charts and other visualisations on air pollution.
There was a high level of PM across all of London in September when you saw a spike, it was a few days of warm, dry and still weather (I was at the Oval watching cricket in a t shirt) - so probably not about wood burners - comparative data is insightful.
The air quality while I was at the Oval was better than the daily mean at the nearest Breath Monitor. Journey to and from the cricket was on tube and train - and AQ was worse than Breathe daily mean
So personal exposure is different to what Breathe measures (it can be higher or lower) and baseline levels across London move up and down