Kepler 99

Brescia | Measuring the Value of Earth Observations

Managing Air Quality Through Earth Observation

High-Level Project Summary

Once we settled on the problem of air quality we started by identifying a place we were both invested in. Upon discovering that very useful information was being overlooked or even ignored altogether by the local government we turned our focus elsewhere in order to see what could actually be accomplished. Studying, in particular, the results achieved in Colorado and Connecticut then gave us the opportunity to visualize the possible outcomes of this very same application in northern Italy. Finally, we chose to assess the effectiveness of these measures through life expectancy prior to and following the employment of EO, being in our opinion the most tangible and comprehensive option.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GwcimotcgdNB9ft_OWwmx3Jy64Ljj4pg?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jKpII6DdO1bGt2g0lOAr6IpURmbIdtzA?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

Our project has the main objective of presenting the path that starts from gathering data from Earth Observation through the use of Satellites and leads to a better knowledge of the state of air quality allowing decision makers to bring about more benefits for the population. We decided to use the essay format to present our work. The main software we used is Microsoft Word. We added examples and case studies to validate our observations. We also added images of air quality concentrations in some regions. The target we would like to reach is that of general population and particularly the decision makers that would benefit from knowing about this topic.

Space Agency Data

We used informations from ESA and NASA websites to gather informations regarding the Sentinel-5P satellite and the Colorado case study. We used these data to provide examples of how Earth Observation in the field of air quality monitoring can be useful to societies around the world.

Hackathon Journey

Despite being our first approach with this kind of event we both were very invested since the beginning.

The major difficulty we had to face concerned our practical background since neither of us had any experience with coding, programming, or web designing. Nonetheless, we did try to use every resource we had at our disposal so that we could really seize all the opportunities such a challenge offers.

What drove us to this particular challenge is the fact that, living in Milan, we have to face the consequences of air pollution almost on a daily basis. We wanted to see if something could actually be done to mitigate this problem and, in such a case, if the technological advancement provided by Earth Observations could have a practical use.

Our first step was gathering information on how the data was being used by the local government and then looking elsewhere for similar cases. By doing so we had the opportunity not only to study what such implementation had brought but, most importantly, to compare the very different outcomes and to picture future results.