Air Pollution Data Visualization Method based on Google Earth and KML for Seoul Air Quality Monitoring in Real-time

Abstract

In Seoul, Korea, air pollution data are available to the public as numeric values on the concentration of pollutants in the air on a webpage. The numeric information is not conducive to determining the air pollution level intuitively. To address this problem, this study developed and implemented a program for visualizing the air pollution level for six pollutants (i.e., sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO), ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and two sizes of particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5)) by obtaining real-time air pollution data using SK Planet Air Quality Request API and generating a keyhole markup language (KML) file defined to visualize the data on Google Earth intuitively. The KML file is linked to Google Earth using the Network Link feature to visualize the air pollution data for Seoul on the three-dimensional (3D) space. The visualized pollution data is expected to promote an intuitive understanding of the data compared to the existing numeric information.