The Chicago Open Air Quality Dashboard is an app for examining current and historical trends in many air quality indicators, centered around a 1km high-resolution particulate matter interpolation model. The app focuses on the 21-county Chicagoland area.
The web host for this app is available at https://herop.shinyapps.io/airq/
There are also readme files available in the Data and Data_Wrangling folders, which explain more about the data, and the automated data collection process, respectively.
The home tab includes 2 explorer pages.
On the Region Explorer
page, the user can select a subset of counties (by clicking) and variables, allowing comparison of their trends between each other and to the mean trend.
On the Health Explorer
page, two maps are provided, allowing the user to select types of weekly sensor data, and a choropleth underlay (either various historic data, or weekly COVID data).
The home tab also includes a link to the Healthy Regions and Policies Lab's Tree Equity Tool, and an about section.
The EPA sensor data tab includes data for PM2.5, PM10, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and lead, from historic EPA sensor readings.
Data from individual sensors is provided, as well as an Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) interpolation, and can be viewed at a monthly or quarterly resolution. Graphs are also provided showing the distributions of sensor readings in general, and compared to the current period.
The meteorological data tab includes data for temperature, pressure, and precipitation, from historical FAA ASOS sensor readings.
Data from individual sensors is provided, as well as an IDW interpolation, and can be viewed at a monthly or quarterly resolution. Graphs are also provided showing the distributions of sensor readings in general, and compared to the current period.
The remote-sensed data tab includes a combination of satellite and surveyed data: Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), Bidirectional Reflectance Factor (BRF), land cover, and elevation.
Data can be selected by quarter. The surfaces provided here are not interpolations.
The PM2.5 model tab gives the results of the lab's neural net PM2.5 interpolation model. The map can be switched between the 3 models the lab has produced.
In addition to the option to switch the color palette to one corresponding to a given period, this tab also provides the option to switch the color palette to one corresponding to each model, to allow easier comparison between models.
Results are provided monthly, and present a better picture of the local trends in PM2.5 than the corresponding IDW interpolation.
The pollution drivers tab provides data that estimate the density of pollutions sources in the Chicagoland area.
Density estimates for emissions sources, and road densities are provided.
Data for other health and population vulnerability information is provided by the Chicago Health Atlas: https://chicagohealthatlas.org
The data used in the map are made available here for download, including .csv data, .geoJSON spatial data, and .grd rasters.