EO Dashboard Hackathon

Eastern European Fighters | Ship Traffic and the Impact on Air Quality

Ship Traffic and the Impact on Air Quality

The COVID-19 pandemic strongly affected global logistics and supply chains, and hence shipping activity. This challenge asks you to target the characterization of dynamic shipping activities as seen from space.

Let's breathe!

Summary

Today our activity makes a significant impact on the environment. The cheapest transportation approach - ships - spoils air, besides water. Here we estimate the air pollution level of ships.

How I Addressed This Challenge

We have chosen the following ports to examine because we had the most accurate and unbiased data about these:

-Los Angeles

-San Francisco

-New York

-Mumbai

-Tokyo

There, we’ve estimated the emissions from ships. Besides, we researched ship engines and found the mean value of the emissions of the engines' by NO2. It is important because air quality is a pressing issue nowadays and we need to see data from different fields to make decisions about protecting our globe. We hope that our solution can help policymakers to come up with better strategies for preserving our environment.

How I Developed This Project

We have considered many options, but the project on the impact of ship traffic on air quality attracted us with its relevance today. Nowadays, news about air pollution and environmental degradation is coming more and more often. We've decided to calculate how much NO2 emissions ships produce and how these emissions have an impact on air quality.

We've calculated the percentage of NO2 ships emissions from the total emissions of this gas in large cities on different continents. We have considered data of NO2 emissions in the observed cities from July 2018 to December 2020.

Our tools were not complicated and we used them to show important indicators. In our project, we used Internet sources to search for information, we also used Excel to create graphs and Apple programs such as Keynote, Notes, and Numbers, to create the presentation and the main document.

During the time of working on the project, we encountered difficulties in finding data, because this field is not widely spoken about. Furthermore, we have some achievements, such as temporary profit in knowledge, the accuracy of data accounting, an extension of our computer science skills, and improvement of our intercultural skills.

How I Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Our project is mostly built on space agency data. Using it, we were able to get trustworthy information about NO2 emissions. Additionally, we appealed to NASA data and finally determined the cities and time period we would consider. All in all, these data had a great impact on our project, some NASA resources that we used changed our vision and understanding of the challenge solution.

Project Demo

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZnwxSjKjp1QATd9bg0qswIE-T1vniYwV/view?usp=sharing

Earth Observing Dashboard Integration

We consider, our solution could be integrated into the Earth Observing Dashboard. We offer large ports to calculate NO2 emissions using the number of vessels and the production of NO2 from a single marine engine. Countries' governments can calculate the percentage of ship emissions in the total volume of NO2 production using data from large ports.

Our charts can be added to the Earth Observing Dashboard. When we click on the cities our charts could be shown with our descriptions under a specific filter 'ship emissions'.