scholarly journals The Impact of Green Space Changes on Air Pollution and Microclimates: A Case Study of the Taipei Metropolitan Area

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (12) ◽  
pp. 8827-8855 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsiao-Lan Liu ◽  
Yu-Sheng Shen
Author(s):  
Yuping Dong ◽  
Helin Liu ◽  
Tianming Zheng

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease that can be caused by various factors, such as asthma-related genes, lifestyle, and air pollution, and it can result in adverse impacts on asthmatics’ mental health and quality of life. Hence, asthma issues have been widely studied, mainly from demographic, socioeconomic, and genetic perspectives. Although it is becoming increasingly clear that asthma is likely influenced by green spaces, the underlying mechanisms are still unclear and inconsistent. Moreover, green space influences the prevalence of asthma concurrently in multiple ways, but most existing studies have explored only one pathway or a partial pathway, rather than the multi-pathways. Compared to greenness (measured by Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, tree density, etc.), green space structure—which has the potential to impact the concentration of air pollution and microbial diversity—is still less investigated in studies on the influence of green space on asthma. Given this research gap, this research took Toronto, Canada, as a case study to explore the two pathways between green space structure and the prevalence of asthma based on controlling the related covariates. Using regression analysis, it was found that green space structure can protect those aged 0–19 years from a high risk of developing asthma, and this direct protective effect can be enhanced by high tree diversity. For adults, green space structure does not influence the prevalence of asthma unless moderated by tree diversity (a measurement of the richness and diversity of trees). However, this impact was not found in adult females. Moreover, the hypothesis that green space structure influences the prevalence of asthma by reducing air pollution was not confirmed in this study, which can be attributed to a variety of causes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Md. Shohel Reza Amin ◽  
Umma Tamima ◽  
Luis Amador Jimenez

This study demonstrates through a case study that detailed analyses, even after the construction of a project, are feasible using current technologies and available data. A case study of highway 25 is used to illustrate the method and verify the levels of air contaminants from additionally induced traffic during and after the construction of highway. Natural traffic growth was removed from the effect of observed gas emissions by comparing observed levels on other further locations in the same metropolitan area. This study estimates air pollution from the additional traffic during and after the construction of A-25 extension project. NO2 levels were spatially interpolated during peak and off-peak hour traffic and traffic density simulated on the road network for four scenarios. Comparing the four scenarios, it was found that levels of NO2 concentrations were reduced at neighbor areas due to less traffic during the construction period. Levels of NO2 after the construction were higher than those in 2008. The simulated traffic density for four scenarios revealed that traffic density was significantly increased on both arterial and access roads within the close vicinity of the extension project during and after its construction.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingyong Wang ◽  
Hong-Ning Dai ◽  
Hao Wang
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
hazem al-najjar ◽  
Nadia Al-Rousan ◽  
Ismail A. Elhaty

Abstract Air pollution depends on seasons, wind speed, temperature, wind direction and air pressure. The effect of different seasons on air pollution is not fully addressed in the reported works. The current study investigated the impact of season on air pollutants including SO2, PM10, NO, NOX, and O3 using NARX method. In the applied methodology, a feature selection was used with each pollutant to find the most important season(s). Afterward, six models are designed based on the feature selection to show the impact of seasons in finding the concentration of pollutants. A case study is conducted on Esenyurt which is one of the most populated and industrialized places in Istanbul to validate the proposed framework. The performance of using all of the designed models with different pollutants showed that using season effect led to improving the performance of predictor and generating high R2 and low error functions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Selin Akaraci ◽  
Xiaoqi Feng ◽  
Thomas Suesse ◽  
Bin Jalaludin ◽  
Thomas Astell Burt

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Schwitalla ◽  
Kirsten Warrach-Sagi ◽  
Hans-Stefan Bauer ◽  
Volker Wulfmeyer

<p>Currently a strong discussion is ongoing in Germany and Europe whether to ban vehicles from downtown areas in order to lower particle concentrations of e.g. PM<sub>10</sub> and NO<sub>2</sub>. As often only few measurements exist inside city centers, little to nothing is known about the horizontal and vertical distributions of air pollutants. Within the EU demonstration project Open Forecast (https://open-forecast.eu/), we applied the WRF-Chem model system version 4.0.3 in order to close this knowledge gap. We zoom in the urban area of Stuttgart, a hot spot of air pollution in Germany. The outermost domain with convection-permitting resolution of 1.25 km encompasses parts of Central Europe in order to provide boundary conditions for the inner two domains.</p><p>The model system was improved in many ways, e.g., with respect to the representation of land cover, urban canopy, and soil properties, which turned out to be key for an acceptable performance. Furthermore, we developed a sophisticated infrastructure to ingest the required high-resolution emission data, which turned out to be very challenging.</p><p>We show that this model approach is likely the best means to understand and to predict air pollution, as the distribution of their constituents depends strongly and simultaneously on the vertical mixing by turbulence, the mesoscale circulation in the complex urban environment, and orographic environment.</p><p>The model system was operated and investigated for a case study of January 21, 2019 during which an alert with respect to the exceedance of PM<sub>10</sub> was issued. We present the simulations of meteorological variables as well as PM<sub>10</sub> and NO<sub>2</sub> and show the complexity of their distribution in the nighttime stable and daytime shallow boundary layer in dependence of the temporal variability of the traffic in the Stuttgart metropolitan area.</p><p>To the best of our knowledge, the results reveal for the first time the complex dynamics of air pollution in complex urban space of Stuttgart at a very high spatial and temporal resolution that cannot currently be achieved with measurements.</p>


2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 557-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette L. Beautrais

Objectives: Suicide safety barriers were removed from a central city bridge in an Australasian metropolitan area in 1996 after having been in place for 60 years. The bridge is a known suicide site and is located adjacent to the region's largest hospital, which includes an acute inpatient psychiatric unit. This paper examines the impact of the removal of these barriers on suicide rates. Method: Data for suicide deaths by jumping from the bridge in question, from 1992to 2000, were obtained from the regional City Police Inquest Office. Data for suicide deaths by jumping from other sites in the metropolitan area in question, from 1992 to 1998, were obtained from the national health statistics database. Case history data about each suicide death by jumping in the metropolitan area in question, from 1994 to 1998, were abstracted from coronial files held by a national database. Results: Removal of safety barriers led to an immediate and substantial increase in both the numbers and rate of suicide by jumping from the bridge in question. In the 4 years following the removal of the barriers (compared with the previous 4 years) the number of suicides increased substantially, from three to 15 (χ2 = 8, df = 1, p < 0.01); the rate of such deaths increased also (χ2 = 6.6, df = 1, p < 0.01). The majority of those who died by jumping from the bridge following the removal of the safety barriers were young male psychiatric patients, with psychotic illnesses. Following the removal of the barriers from the bridge the rate of suicide by jumping in the metropolitan area in question did not change but the pattern of suicides by jumping in the city changed significantly with more suicides from the bridge in question and fewer at other sites. Conclusions: Removal of safety barriers from a known suicide site led to a substantial increase in the numbers of suicide deaths by jumping from that site. These findings appear to strengthen the case for installation of safety barriers at suicide sites in efforts to prevent suicide deaths, and also suggest the need for extreme caution about the removal of barriers from known jumping sites.


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