Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Environmental Public Health

Quantifying greenspace using deep learning in Karachi, Pakistan

Miao Zhang, Hajra Arshad, Manzar Abbas, et al.

Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Other Computer Sciences

Greenspaces in communities are critical for mitigating effects of climate change and have important impacts on our health. We demonstrate a deep learning-based approach which includes green augmentation for measuring and delineating types of greenspace in a city, with satellite imagery. Our method outperforms gold standard methods which use vegetation indices; it segments 80.68% of the [...]

Listening to Manchester: Using citizen science Raspberry Shake seismometers to quantify road traffic

David Healy

Published: 2023-05-31
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Geography

Road traffic is a major contributor to greenhouse gases in our cities. This study has been designed to test whether low-cost citizen science seismometers (Raspberry Shakes) can be used to quantify temporal and spatial variations in road traffic. I used a network of seismometers installed around Greater Manchester to record signals in the frequency range 1-50 Hz. Data were processed using the open [...]

Understanding and Assessing Demographic (In)Equity Resulting from Extreme Heat Exposure due to Lack of Tree Canopies in Norfolk, VA using Agent-Based Modeling

Virginia Zamponi, Kevin Obrien, Erik Jensen, et al.

Published: 2023-03-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability

Prolonged exposure to extreme heat can result in illness and death. In urban areas of dense concentrations of pavement, buildings, and other surfaces that absorb and retain heat, extreme heat conditions can arise regularly and create harmful environmental exposures for residents daily during certain parts of the year. Tree canopies provide shade and help to cool the environment, making mature [...]

Future Temperature Related Deaths in the U.S.: The Impact of Climate Change, Demographics, and Adaptation

Jangho Lee, Andrew Dessler

Published: 2023-02-05
Subjects: Environmental Public Health

Mortality due to extreme temperatures is one of the most important impacts of climate change. In this analysis, we use historic mortality and temperature data from 106 cities in the United States to develop a model that predicts deaths attributable to temperature. With this model and projections of future temperature from climate models, we estimate temperature-related deaths in the United States [...]

Climate and health benefits of a transition from gas to electric cooking

Carlos F. Gould, M. Lorena Bejarano, Brandon de la Cuesta, et al.

Published: 2023-01-26
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies

Household electrification is thought to be an important part of a carbon neutral future, and could also have additional benefits to adopting households such as improved air quality. However, the effectiveness of specific electrification policies in reducing total emissions and boosting household livelihoods remains a crucial open question in both developed and developing countries. We [...]

Wildfire influence on recent US pollution trends

Marshall Burke, Marissa Childs, Brandon de la Cuesta, et al.

Published: 2022-12-16
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies

Steady improvements in ambient air quality in the US over the past several decades have led to large public health benefits. However, recent trends in PM2.5 concentrations, a key pollutant, have stagnated or begun to reverse throughout much of the US. We quantify the contribution of wildfire smoke to these trends and find that since 2016, wildfire smoke has significantly slowed or reversed [...]

Rapid estimation of climate-air quality interactions in integrated assessment using a response surface model

Sebastian David Eastham, Erwan Monier, Daniel Rothenberg, et al.

Published: 2022-09-16
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies

Air quality and climate change are substantial and linked sustainability challenges, and there is a need for improved tools to assess the implications of addressing them in combination. High-fidelity chemistry-climate simulations can capture combined climate-air quality responses to policy change, but computational cost has prevented integration of accurate air quality impacts into integrated [...]

A Technical Overview of the North Carolina ECONet

Sheila M. Saia, Sean P. Heuser, Myleigh D. Neill, et al.

Published: 2022-07-20
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Plant Sciences

Regional weather networks–also referred to as mesonets–are imperative for filling in the spatial and temporal data gaps between nationally supported weather stations. The North Carolina Environment and Climate Observing Network (ECONet) fills this regional role; it is a mesoscale network of 44 (as of 2023) automated stations collecting 12 environmental variables every minute across North [...]

The Lock-Down Effects of COVID-19 on the Air Pollution Indices in Iran and Its Neighbors

Mohammad Fayaz

Published: 2022-07-02
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Other Statistics and Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models

Introduction The Covid-19 restrictions have a lot of various peripheral negative and positive effects like economic shocks and decreasing air pollution, respectively. Many studies showed NO2 reduction in most parts of the world. Method Iran and its land and maritime neighbors have about 7.4% of the world population and 6.3% and 5.8% of World COVID-19 cases and deaths, respectively. The air [...]

Quantitative and distributive measurement of ambient air pollution for global burden of disease

Ning Zhang, Sourangsu Chowdhury, Huabo Duan, et al.

Published: 2022-02-03
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Public Health

Air quality impacts human health from multiple perspectives. Ambient air pollution (AAP) exposure poses a great contribution to the global burden of disease (BoD). The United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to evaluate sustainability levels and improve human living environments. In particular, the two indicators 3.9.1 and 11.6.2, i.e. fine particulate matters (PM2.5 and [...]

Wildfire Smoke Exposure Worsens Learning Outcomes

Jeff Wen, Marshall Burke

Published: 2021-12-09
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Statistical Models

Wildfires have increased in frequency and severity over the past two decades, threatening to undo substantial air quality improvements. We investigate the effect of wildfire smoke exposure on learning outcomes across the US using standardized test scores from 2009-2016 for nearly 11,700 school districts and satellite-derived estimates of daily smoke exposure. Relative to a school year with no [...]

Exposures and behavioral responses to wildfire smoke

Marshall Burke, Sam Heft-Neal, Jessica Li, et al.

Published: 2021-10-12
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Statistical Models

The impacts of environmental change on human outcomes often depend on local exposures and behavioral responses that are challenging to observe with traditional administrative or sensor data. We show how data from private pollution sensors, cell phones, social media posts, and internet search activity yield new insights on exposures and behavioral responses during large wildfire smoke events [...]

Upstream oil and gas production and ambient air pollution in California

David J.X. Gonzalez, Christina K. Francis, Gary M. Shaw, et al.

Published: 2021-04-15
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Public Health, Oil, Gas, and Energy

Background. Prior studies have found that residential proximity to upstream oil and gas production is associated with increased risk of adverse health outcomes. Emissions of ambient air pollutants from oil and gas wells in the preproduction and production stages have been proposed as conferring risk of adverse health effects, but the extent of air pollutant emissions and resulting nearby [...]

Crisis at the Salton Sea: The Vital Role of Science

Marilyn Fogel, Hoori Ajami, Emma Aronson, et al.

Published: 2021-03-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Salton Sea—a hypersaline, terminal lake in southern California—is in crisis. A combination of mismanagement and competition among federal, state and local agencies has hindered efforts to address declining lake levels and unstable water chemistry. This delay has heightened the public health threat to regional communities as retreating shorelines expose dry lakebed— a source of potentially [...]

ENSO Drives Child Undernutrition in the Global Tropics

Jesse K Anttila-Hughes, Amir Sultan Jina, Gordon C McCord

Published: 2020-11-13
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Other Environmental Sciences, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability

The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a principal component of global climate variability known to influence a host of social and economic outcomes, but its systematic effects on human health remain poorly understood. We estimate ENSO’s association with child nutrition at global scale by combining variation in ENSO intensity from 1986-2018 with children’s height and weight from 186 surveys [...]

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