State of the Air - California

Clean air and water are essential for almost every living being on Earth. But unfortunately, a lot of places on our planet have a scarcity of clean air and water. For this study project, I am focusing on my home state of California because American Lung Association's State of the Air 2019 and 2020 reports list California cities as most polluted in every category of it's study.

I started working on this project in Nov 2019 and used the 2019 data for my analysis. A more recent report for 2020 has been released in late April 2020. The storymap will be updated with recent data.

The cities in California featuring in top 10 of the most polluted cities in US list are placemarked in the map below.

The air quality problem in California is a complex problem. The reason for this is because each region in CA has its own set of unique factors which contribute to the problem of bad air quality. Therefore there is no one single solution to fix air quality issue, rather it has to be unique combination of solutions for each factor and each region.

In this story map I will focus on four regions in CA which received an Annual Fail grade in the recent American Lung Association report and have the most need to address poor air quality issue. This annual Pass/Fail grade is based on only the current year's data and EPA standards. It is different calculation from the Weighted average grades mentioned earlier.

1. San Joaquin Valley area
2. Los Angeles Area
3. San Bernardino and Riverside area
4. Plumas County

In the map below, the regions in black are the areas which received an Annual Fail grade. Click on the interactive map to get more information about the air quality of the region.

To check for this, I overlayed the Cities layer on the air quality map. The red-orange spheres on the map are the major cities in CA. About 44% of cities (197 out of a total of 444 cities) are in the Fail grade area. A point to note is more than half of the cities (about 99 of the 197)are in the Los Angeles County.

The cluster analysis map of the Cities and Fail Grade Areas gives us a better understanding. Mostly the cities in Los Angeles cluster are in the air quality fail grade area.

The main factors affecting air quality in the Los Angeles area are the high number of vehicles and population.

Considering the recent Shelter-In-Place and lockdown situations, I wanted to see the effects of the changes on air quality. The premise is that the number of vehicles on highways and roads is considerably low now ( Updated April 15, 2020). I generated multi-year plots on EPA website ( https://www.epa.gov/outdoor-air-quality-data/air-data-multiyear-tile-plot ). Here are some plots:

San Joaquin Valley area is part of central valley of California. The topography of the area makes it very vulnerable to poor air quality. The valley area is bounded by the Coastal Range on the east, Sierra Nevada range on the west and Tehachapi mountains to the south. When wildfires occur in northern California, the smoke laden winds get travel south into the valley and get trapped. The smoke winds also called smoke waves form a thick layer over the already poor quality air, making the situation worse.

The San Joaquin region is one of the most productive (multi-billion dollar revenue) agricultural regions in the world. The farming activities, the trucking activity to transport the produce contribute immensely to the air quality problem in the San Joaquin valley area. Interstates 5 and 15 are major highways in the area.

• Smog from Los Angeles area
• Rapid increase in the number of warehouses in the area, thereby increasing vehicular emissions and population.

Plumas county is located in where the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges meet. Over 70% of the area in the county in US National Forest Area. The yellow outline in the above map depicts Plumas county border. The area in green in US National Park and Forest area clipped to the county border. It is very apparent that most of the county is mountainous in terrain. The primary factors for poor air quality in Plumas county inspite of very low population and dense forests are:

• Lumber Mills
• Woordburning
• Road dust from unpaved roads
• Construction
• Prescribed burning
• Wildlfires
• Woodstoves

The recent virus outbreak prompted me to add this section to my story map. The purpose of this analysis is to see if the counties with the highest cases have any correlation to the air quality.

I think that the solution to improving air quality is not singular. A combination of of methods and practices specific to the geographic region is a more efficient approach. The solutions vary spatially and temporally, as each region is unique in the causes of air pollution.

It is important to always be aware about how different causes affect the air we breathe, as it is directly related to our health. In addition, by raising awareness about these issues, the greater likelihood there is that someone will be able to efficiently solve these problems.

Here are some resources to check air quality data:

• Ms.Annie Rosen, Assistant Air Pollution Chemist in Monitoring & Technical Services at San Diego Air Pollution Control District
• California Department of Motor Vehicles  https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/e52e6d02-6fa6-483a-bbcd-d888f1b4035b/MotorVehicleFuelTypes_County_190913.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CVID= 
• American Lung Association :  https://www.lung.org/our-initiatives/healthy-air/sota/ 
• https://www.lung.org/our-initiatives/healthy-air/sota/city-rankings/states/california/
• Plumas  C ounty Air Quality Report :  https://www.plumascounty.us/DocumentCenter/View/9348/43_Air-Quality_SC?bidId 

•  https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Immunization/ncov2019.asp 
• County Level COVID data :  https://data.chhs.ca.gov/