Tag Archives | air quality
Video

Air Quality and Human Health: An Interview with Roger Peng

By on April 22, 2013 in Air quality, Sights
Interview with Roger Peng from YCELP on Vimeo.

Roger Peng, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently spoke at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies about his research estimating the health benefits of reducing particulate matter air pollution. He discussed common study designs for understanding environmental pollution health impacts as well [...]

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Shanghai’s New Air Quality mascot

By on January 22, 2013 in Air quality, China

Shanghai’s Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) recently updated how it communicates daily air quality via its website and Weibo account.  Shanghai has one of the best websites for accessing information about air quality, including real-time pollution data in pollutant concentrations and Air Quality Index (AQI) readings. They also give you a bar chart of AQI readings for [...]

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Images

Ningbo’s Blue and Transparent Skies

By on August 12, 2012 in Sights

Ningbo’s Blue and Transparent Skies

Ningbo, a seaport city in the northeast of Zhejiang province in China’s more developed Southeast region, has come in first in the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) ranking for the last two years in a row.  Because of their stellar performance on the PITI, I thought it’d be worth paying [...]

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Images

Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center’s Air Quality Reporting

By on August 7, 2012 in Sights

Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center’s Air Quality Reporting

Meet Li Juan, PhD – an engineer in the Atmospheric Monitoring Division of Shanghai’s Environmental Monitoring Centre (EMC). She prepares the daily air quality reports for the Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau. Most of the process to retrieve the data and calculate the daily Air Pollution Index (API) is automated, as data from each of Shanghai’s [...]

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Video

Beijing City University students make air quality documentary

By on June 12, 2012 in China, Sights

A few ambitious undergraduate students from Beijing City University filmed a documentary on air quality in Beijing, particularly examining the issue of PM 2.5 measurement and reporting. They interviewed me when I was in Beijing in March. The reason why I speak in English during the interview as opposed to in Chinese is because of the relatively sensitive nature of the questions they planned to ask me. As a Chinese-American, I consider myself American first and foremost and wanted that to come across. Depending on how they edited the video, I was worried that something I said may have been taken out of context, so it was important for me to not appear as a Chinese, but rather as an outside expert.

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China’s new Air Quality Index: How does it measure up?

By on March 28, 2012 in Air quality, China, Indices

Earlier this month, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) released the official (trial) revisions to the Ambient Air Quality Index (AQI, which is a notable shift from its previous form as the Air Pollution Index, or API).  I wrote last February about how the MEP was already revising the API to be more in line with the [...]

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Seeing China’s pollution from space

By on February 20, 2012 in Air quality, China, Remote Sensing

This post originally appeared on China Dialogue.  The Great Wall may not, after all, be visible from space – but Chinese air pollution is. A team of researchers at Battelle Memorial Institute and Columbia University, in collaboration with Yale University, recently used satellite readings to produce data on fine particulate concentrations in Chinese provinces. While these [...]

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