The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted global, regional, and local communities alike. A city like Hong Kong, where 7.5mn people are concentrated in an area well under half the size of Rhode Island (the US’s smallest state), makes for an intriguing case study to investigate the impacts of COVID-19. At the time of writing, Hong Kong has experienced a total of 11,920 COVID-19 cases and 210 deaths. With a maximum daily case count of 173, the city has implemented a broad range of precautionary restrictions that have impacted all facets of daily life.

Though air quality has its immediate ties to COVID-19 due to its influence on respiratory health, it has been a key component of Hong Kong’s public health agenda far before the pandemic. This investigation and resulting solution product, therefore, is one of many ways that data can be operationalized to educate and update local Hong Kongers of air quality-related issues. On June 29, 2021, the Hong Kong Government announced an ambitious new Clean Air Plan, with the ultimate goal of meeting World Health Organization air quality standards by 2035.

This is why, under the theme of visualizing change over time, we built an interactive platform that allows Hong Kongers to explore the effects of COVID-19 on air quality, public health, and mobility within the city -- and how they may or may not match up with their own pandemic experiences. Our project draws upon the wealth of global datasets available from the Earth Observation Dashboard and operationalizes it with local datasets that provide a deeper dive into the individual impacts of COVID-19 on the lives of Hong Kongers. This solution product can be easily implemented in cities all over the world to enable citizens to contextualize the Earth Observation Dashboard's data within their daily lives.

We are a team of Hong Kong citizens who have a passion for space exploration, data science, and storytelling. It was thrilling to see the abundance of data available on the Earth Observation Dashboard, yet we noticed a lack of local indicators within our region. Using the EO Dashboard air quality indicators as a jumping-off point, we decided to integrate the open-source global datasets with the broad range of local datasets to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 in our city. Our goal was to develop a framework and toolkit for people to explore data and form questions relating to their own community and personal experiences during the pandemic.

Building off the diverse skillsets that our team of data scientists, industry experts, and web developers had to offer, we used a wide variety of tools along our project pipeline. Satellite data acquisition and processing was done through R, QGIS, and Python. From there, our team utilized Tableau Public to visualize the data in a clean and interactive manner before integrating it into the final web product.

Having never met before the day of this challenge (and still never having met face-to-face!), it was a challenge for our team to initially solidify our project idea, timeline, and delegate tasks. However, we overcame this through daily zoom calls and lots of chatting on Discord. By the end of the project, we all felt that we had been working together as a well-oiled machine for many years. It was an additional challenge that only one of our members had a geosciences background and experience with remote sensing -- but this proved to be a wonderful opportunity to share knowledge with the rest of the team.

We utilized NASA’s OMI NO2 tropospheric column from the EO Dashboard to serve as a launchpad for our investigation on air quality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. The initial EO Dashboard visualization gave rise to further research questions that prompted our search for complementary local datasets. This process is documented on our d ata exploration log.

Our project resulted in the aggregation of local data inspired from the trends we observed from the EO Dashboard’s global air quality indicator. We built a simple interactive platform by which users (in our case, local Hong Kong citizens) can explore the relationship between air quality and various socioeconomic factors over the past several years. 

• Here is a link to a screen recording of our interactive data platform in use.
• Here is a link to theinteractive platform itself.
• We produced a repor t that gives context to Hong Kong’s socioeconomic and environmental nuances, presents our findings, and discusses further implications. 

The global datasets that were made available to us on the EO Dashboard inspired us to embark on a quest to operationalize the wealth of local data available in Hong Kong to draw further insights on the impact of COVID-19 on our city. Our solution allows users to contextualize the trends from global satellite imagery within the nuances of their city and society -- and therefore draw findings that are relevant on an individual and community level. 

Integrating a solution like our interactive platform with the EO Dashboard can allow users to upload or integrate local datasets (particularly from open-access government organizations) to explore the diversity of NASA, ESA, and JAXA products within the context of their local nuances.

The primary global data sources obtained from the EO Dashboard used were:

• NASA OMI: NO2 Tropospheric Column
• Google Mobility

Local data sources were obtained from:

• Hong Kong (HK) Environmental Protection Department
• HK Civil Aviation Department
• HK Census and Statistics Dpt.
• Our World in Data
• World Air Quality Index
• Google Trends

Greater detail on data sources are documented on our data exploration log.

And other sources for our research report can be found in the report text.

#air quality, #Hong Kong, #pandemic, #urban, #mobility, #consumer behavior, #public health, #interactive data, #data visualization

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.