Quality of air due to traffic in NL
Tudor Dascălu, 1546260
Introduction
In this poster the correlation between the air
quality and traffic will be explore, based on the
data of numerous station all over the
Netherlands. But…
Does traffic really influence the air quality?
In this research it was analyzed the quality of air
from the perspective of NO2 percentile and the
number of vehicles passing by that station. NO2 is
a harmful gas which can have negative effects on
the lungs, it was measured at the same time as
the number of cars in that area, resulting the
answer for the question above.
Results
As shown in the plots below, at the first sight someone
tends to say that the NO2 percentile really depends on
the traffic, since the percentile is bigger between the
hours 8-14 and since the percentile is low in the months
5-7. On one hand is could be true, but on the other hand
there are way more factors that we need to take in
consideration when we think that the percentile is bigger
in the morning, for example we need to think about all
other things that could emit NO2 (factories, home heating
o anything else that used combustion).
Discussion
With all the data that was acquired from the stations from
all over the NL which then was processed into the
visualization above, the relation between air quality and
traffic would be hard to draw, since the data was collected
only from all the vehicles that happened to pass by,
meaning that our measurements could gone wrong because
not all vehicles emit NO2 and because there could be other
things in the area that could produced more NO 2. This
problem could be solved in future by an algorithm than can
select data by the type of the car, since all cars have already
an index of pollution.
Graded Assignment 1, 2AIB0 Data Analytics for Engineers 2020/2021
Methods
In order to find exact answers for how the NO2
depends on the traffic, there are used line plots,
scatter plots and violin plots. The line plots were
used to show the changes in NO2 percentile
depending on the hour and the month. The violin
plots are used to show the differences of NO2
between the weekdays and between the years
2015-2019. The scatter plots were used to
illustrate that the percentile of NO2 does not really
depends on the number of vehicles (the yellow
scatter plot), but to show that the NO2 depends on
other factors like temperature for example(the
blue scatter plot).
According to the scatter plot, we cannot
sum up a conclusion by analyzing only
the dependence of NO2 on number of
vehicles, since there is no uniform
distribution. Now if we analyze the blue
scatter plot, we could summarize that
the NO2 will be smaller if the
temperature will be bigger since there is
a uniform representation of the data.
Conclusion
To sum up, from all the given data, it cannot
be derived any relationship regarding the
dependence of NO2 on the traffic, because on
the yellow scatter plot it can be noticed that
the same value of NO2, namely 30-40%, could
be at any number of cars between the range 0
and 300000+. However, there is a conclusion,
namely that NO2 depends on a lot more
factors that influence its percentile other than
cars.