Hampton Roads Health and Air Quality III: Assessing Air Quality Impacts of Construction-Related and Rush Hour Traffic in Hampton Roads

This project is the third in a series of collaborations between NASA DEVELOP and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to monitor air quality in and around the Hampton Roads region. This study focuses on using Earth observations in conjunction with ground sensors, health, and traffic
data to monitor trends in Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) surrounding the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel (HRBT) in relation to an ongoing expansion project. For this project two sensors were utilized: NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution (TEMPO) and the European Space Agency’s Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). TEMPO showed diurnal patterns in NO2 levels using an oversampling technique to increase its spatial resolution while TROPOMI showed NO2 levels before and during the expansion. Pandora ground-based sensors from the Pandonia Global Network allowed validation of TEMPO measurements, and data from the Center for Disease Control allowed spatial comparison of pollution and respiratory disease. These sources in conjunction with traffic data from the Virginia Department of Transportation allowed for map creation showing tropospheric NO2 levels on multiple timescales before and during the HRBT expansion, a time series comparing measurements from TEMPO and Pandora, and a bivariate map comparing hotspots of tropospheric NO2 and asthma prevalence. These project findings provide the DEQ insight into traffic patterns and their relation to NO2 levels and public health surrounding the HRBT. Results show that long-term satellite measurements can be used alongside health data to identify high-risk communities. Additionally, TEMPO’s hourly measurements can be used to track NO2 trends at an unprecedented temporal resolution in Hampton Roads, and oversampling enables TEMPO data to display trends in tropospheric NO2 over smaller areas than standard TEMPO data.