Abstract
With rapid population growth, both urbanization and transportation affect air pollution, population health, and global warming. A number of air pollutants are released from industrial facilities and other activities and may cause adverse effects on human health and the environment. One of the biggest air pollutants, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), is mainly caused by the combustion of fossil fuels, especially from traffic exhaust gases. Over the years, air pollution has been monitored using satellite remote sensing data. In this study, we investigate the relationship of the tropospheric NO2 retrieved from the recently launched Sentinel-5 Precursor, a low-earth-orbit atmosphere mission dedicated to monitoring air pollution equipped with the spectrometer Tropomoi (Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument), and the population density over Turkey. For this purpose, we use the mean value of the NO2 collected from July 2018 to January 2019 and the statistic population data from 2017. The results showed a significant correlation of higher than 0.72 between the population density and the maximum NO2 values. For future studies, we recommend investigating the correlation of different air pollutants with population and other factors contributing to air and environmental pollution.
Highlights
The main causes of air pollution include economic development, urbanization, energy consumption, transportation and motorization, as well as the rapid increase of urban population
The biggest air pollutants encountered in our daily life are particulate matter (PM), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO), and carbon dioxide (CO2) [3]
(Figure 5) NO2 values, meaning that more than 50% of the NO2 can be explained by the linear relation with the population statistics
Summary
The main causes of air pollution include economic development, urbanization, energy consumption, transportation and motorization, as well as the rapid increase of urban population. As the world population is rising, it is greatly increasing humanity’s impact on the Earth’s natural environment. The biggest air pollutants encountered in our daily life are particulate matter (PM), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO), and carbon dioxide (CO2) [3]. NO2 is an important component of urban air pollution and a precursor to groundlevel ozone, particulate matter, and acid rain [4]. The major source of NO2 is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. Other sources of NO2 are petrol and metal refining, electricity generation from coal-fired power stations, other manufacturing industries and food processing
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