The longer human activities are changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the more visible, wider, and longer lasting the scope of environmental impacts may be. Your challenge is to tell a visual story about the impacts of the pandemic using Earth observation data and other complementary information.
Our project comprises of a series of fields observed and affected by Covid-19 and its restrictions. Shipping, agriculture, Pollution(CO2, NO2, greenhouse gases), water quality fields take a play in our narrative.
We have gathered some valuable points combined them together and formed a series of observations under each topic, which comes under the motto of the challenge.
With a observation from the dashboard over a country with a indicator, we tried to see whether the event was actual by verifying with more cases, data and references.
We have looked on the data with combinatorics over the given countries and indicators to find what is the pattern happening and how covid-19 and its restrictions come into play.
Agriculture : Seasonal farm lands has got a hit because of the pandemic because of the requirement of external labors and need for proper profit for the activity. Cash crops harvest, planting rate and profit has gone down because of the industrial dependency and utility needs. Farm products which require more transport(localized seasonal crop activity) to reach the consumers got a hit due to the pandemic. Staple food crops has not shown any visible trend shift.
Pollution : CO2 patches has been clearly dissipated quite a bit but incase of NO2 the hotspot patches remain the same but the radius of density got a decrease in concentration. It is partially because of the density difference between CO2 - NO2 and also NO2 is mainly emitted by thermal power plants, which was not down as much as other industries due to lockdown, they functioned during this period. So there's an inference here. Also In NO2 emission monthly time series graph we can see that the emission drops in the months of June ,July ,August and increases from there on. It may be due to the monsoon winds which provide sources for wind and hydro power generation.(Country - India)
Water quality :
Improvement in the quality of number of rivers in India including Ganga, Cauvery, Sutlej and Yamuna etc. The real time water monitoring data by Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) state they have found suitable propagation of aquatic life, the Dissolved Oxygen (DO) levels have improved. The water quality has enhanced by 40 - 50%. The toxic foam caused due to the mix of detergents, chemicals from industries and sewage has vanished after years.
In Barcelona, we can see random patches near the shore in anomaly levels once after 2 months, because of the disposure methods followed there. Due to Covid-19 lockdowns there is not much shift in the patch area or concentration with the same time series.
Shipping : Basic ship transports(Food, medicines, raw materials for necessities) has continued but the ship movement for commercials and brands has dropped due to lockdown and restrictions, which lead to a considerable decrease in ship traffic. Although it doesn't impact much on the route emission levels as observed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7299871/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720325298
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frwa.2021.635529/full#B21
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146362/airborne-nitrogen-dioxide-plummets-over-china
https://icsin.org/blogs/2020/12/29/the-indian-ocean-region-ior-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.