CAREER: Observational Constraints on Neighborhood-level Air Quality in Major United States cities and Dakar, Senegal

The project seeks to advance understanding of sources and impacts of variability of air pollutants in cities across the U.S. and in the city of Dakar, Senegal. Variability in urban pollutant distributions have shown to result in inequality in pollutant exposure with neighborhood demographics, resulting in significant disparities in health and life expectancy.

Field work is planned in Dakar that will lead to the training of U.S. and Senegalese students in an international collaboration involving physical and social scientists. Education and outreach activities are planned for middle school to university level students, as well as the general public.

A range of datasets will be integrated, including novel high spatial resolution nitrogen dioxide (NO2) airborne spectrometer observations, satellite-based NO2 columns, in situ aircraft measurements of numerous trace species, vehicle-based in situ observations, ground-based NO2 columns, and U.S. and Senegalese demographic datasets. The work will further expand the application of NO2 satellite remote sensing to study controls over intra-urban spatiotemporal variability, especially as it results in air pollution inequality, and advance land-use regression modeling methods through the use of new predictor variable datasets and constraints on pollutant temporal variability between weekdays and weekends.

Educational and outreach activities align with research themes, including the development of a middle school experiential air pollution curriculum that explores student motivation in STEM when STEM is framed as a tool for environmental justice, the development of an interdisciplinary and international undergraduate and graduate course on West African urban air pollution, and the creation of a visually-appealing API depicting city-wide NO2 disparities in at least twenty U.S. cities and Dakar, featuring data and code sharing and educational content in English, Spanish, French, and Wolof.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.