Spatial-Temporary Analysis of Istanbul Air Pollution During the Pandemic using Google Earth Engine and Google Community Mobility Reports

Year 2023, Volume: 6 Issue: 1, 1 - 14, 30.06.2023

G. Çiğdem Çavdaroğlu , Ahmet Okan Arık

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought drastic changes to people's daily life and environmental characteristics. To control the pandemic, all governments have implemented particular policies for their countries and imposed restrictions that affect people's daily life. The traffic index has decreased in many countries and cities depending on the restrictions. Therefore, restrictions in many countries and cities have positively impacted air quality. However, the opposite has also been observed in metropolitan cities. In this study, the change in the air quality of Istanbul, which is accepted as Turkey's largest metropolitan city, has been examined. First, the spatio-temporal distribution of air pollutants (NO2, CO, and SO2) has been analyzed using Sentinel-5P NRTI satellite images. Then six independent variable groups (traffic index of Istanbul, daily deaths in Istanbul, Google community mobility reports of Istanbul, fuel prices, stringency index of Turkey, two logical attributes regarding the Covid-19 restrictions and in-class education) were collected and combined to analyze the correlations between these variable groups and air pollutant concentrations. According to the spatial distribution graphs, there is a tendency to decrease NO2, CO, and SO2 pollutant concentrations in Istanbul when the restrictions are applied in Turkey. There was no significant relationship between the decrease in community mobility in Istanbul and pollutant concentrations, although an increase in air quality has been observed in many cities due to the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Keywords

Spatial, pandemic, air pollution

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