Spatiotemporal Analysis Of Air Pollution And Its Application In Public Health

Spatiotemporal Analysis of Air Pollution and Its Application in Public Health reviews, in detail, the tools needed to understand the spatial temporal distribution and trends of air pollution in the atmosphere, including how this information can be tied into the diverse amount of public health data available using accurate GIS techniques. By utilizing GIS to monitor, analyze and visualize air pollution problems, it has proven to not only be the most powerful, accurate and flexible way to understand the atmosphere, but also a great way to understand the impact air pollution has in diverse populations. This book is essential reading for novices and experts in atmospheric science, geography and any allied fields investigating air pollution. Introduces readers to the benefits and uses of geo-spatiotemporal analyses of big data to reveal new and greater understanding of the intersection of air pollution and health Ties in machine learning to improve speed and efficacy of data models Includes developing visualizations, historical data, and real-time air pollution in large geographic areas

This book focuses on a range of geospatial applications for environmental health research, including environmental justice issues, environmental health disparities, air and water contamination, and infectious diseases. Environmental health research is at an exciting point in its use of geotechnologies, and many researchers are working on innovative approaches. This book is a timely scholarly contribution in updating the key concepts and applications of using GIS and other geospatial methods for environmental health research. Each chapter contains original research which utilizes a geotechnical tool (Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, GPS, etc.) to address an environmental health problem. The book is divided into three sections organized around the following themes: issues in GIS and environmental health research; using GIS to assess environmental health impacts; and geospatial methods for environmental health. Representing diverse case studies and geospatial methods, the book is likely to be of interest to researchers, practitioners and students across the geographic and environmental health sciences. The authors are leading researchers and practitioners in the field of GIS and environmental health.

Spatiotemporal Environmental Health Modelling: A Tractatus Stochasticus provides a holistic, conceptual and quantitative framework for Environmental Health Modelling in space-time. The holistic framework integrates two aspects of Environmental Health Science that have been previously treated separately: the environmental aspect, which involves the natural processes that bring about human exposure to harmful substances; and the health aspect, which focuses on the interactions of these substances with the human body. Some of the fundamental issues addressed in this work include variability, scale, uncertainty, and space-time connectivity. These topics are important in the characterization of natural systems and health processes. Spatiotemporal Environmental Health Modelling: A Tractatus Stochasticus explains why modern stochastics is the appropriate mechanical vehicle for addressing such issues in a rigorous way. In particular, modern stochastics incorporates concepts and methods from probability, classical statistics, geostatistics, statistical mechanics and field theory. The authors present a synthetic view of environmental health that embraces all of the various components and focuses on their mutual interactions. Spatiotemporal Environmental Health Modeling: A Tractatus Stochasticus includes new material on Bayesian maximum entropy estimation techniques and space-time random field estimation methods. The authors show why these methods have clear advantages over the classical geostatistical estimation procedures and how they can be used to provide accurate space-time maps of environmental health processes. Also included are expositions of diagrammatic perturbation and renormalization group analysis, which have not been previously discussed within the context of Environmental Health. Finally, the authors present stochastic indicators that can be used for large-scale characterization of contamination and investigations of health effects at the microscopic level. This book will be a useful reference to both researchers and practitioners of Environmental Health Sciences. It will appeal specifically to environmental engineers, geographers, geostatisticians, earth scientists, toxicologists, epidemiologists, pharmacologists, applied mathematicians, physicists and biologists.

Air Pollution, Climate and Health integrates the current understanding of the issues of air pollution, climate change and human health. The book provides a comprehensive overview of these issues to help readers gain a better understanding of how they interact and impact air quality and public health. Regional examples from across the globe include issues related to PM 2.5, haze, winter pollution, heat related mortality and aerosols. These issues are addressed utilizing current research and laboratory-based, observation-based, and modeling-based analysis. This is an essential resource for all professionals investigating the impacts of climate change or air pollution on human health. Provides a comprehensive understanding of the interactions between climate change, air quality and human health Includes evidence-based findings to help clarify the mechanisms on how air pollution impacts climate and how a changing climate is impacting those pollutants Covers a number of pollution sources and products impacting climate change, including energy, haze, particulate matter, aerosols, PM 2.5 and transport

Air Pollution and Community Health A Critical Review and Data Sourcebook Frederick W. Lipfert Air pollution has affected community health since the advent of the industrial age and arguably since the discovery of fire. While organized societies have taken important steps to reduce and control emissions, the quality of the air we breathe today remains a critical concern. Air Pollution and Community Health transforms the major epidemiological works of the past 40 years into a coherent picture of the effects of air pollution on respiration, hospitalization, and mortality. The book re-evaluates these studies to clarify their findings within a consistent analytical framework and to define statistical relationships between various measures of community health and air quality. Lipfert emphasizes observational studies and the quality of the data used. The book is organized by health endpoint rather than by pollutant, beginning with the major air pollution disasters that helped galvanize the environmental revolution. His analysis shows that community air pollution acts primarily to exacerbate existing conditions in susceptible individuals, rather than to create new cases of respiratory disease. He concludes that "the alarms that sounded over 40 years ago are still ringing"--substantial health risks are still presented by the current urban mixtures of air pollution. Many of the studies reviewed suggest that the current ambient air quality standards required by the Clean Air Act fail to protect the health of the most susceptible individuals. Further, because of the role of natural sources of air pollution, questions are raised as to whether complete protection can ever be achieved. The book presents data from many of the epidemiological studies reviewed, including those of the major disasters of 1930-1960. Graphical presentations are featured for easy reference; many new analyses are presented here for the first time. The book also includes introductory chapters on air pollution, statistical analysis, and respiratory physiology, for the convenience of readers who may not be well versed in all of these topics. The major technical chapters on mortality and hospitalization include reviews of the effects of air pollution episodes, time-series analyses, cross-sectional studies, and long-term studies of pollution abatement. The chapters on respiratory function include both the effects of air pollution on function and the role of lung function as an independent predictor of longevity. Air Pollution and Community Health presents one of the first comprehensive analyses of the subject. It should be used to re-examine the effectiveness of air pollution research and control policies in the United States and is essential reading for all professionals involved in air pollution control or public health.

The book “Integrated human exposure to air pollution” aimed to increase knowledge about human exposure in different micro-environments, or when citizens are performing specific tasks, to demonstrate methodologies for the understanding of pollution sources and their impact on indoor and ambient air quality, and, ultimately, to identify the most effective mitigation measures to decrease human exposure and protect public health. Taking advantage of the latest available tools, such as internet of things (IoT), low-cost sensors and a wide access to online platforms and apps by the citizens, new methodologies and approaches can be implemented to understand which factors can influence human exposure to air pollution. This knowledge, when made available to the citizens, along with the awareness of the impact of air pollution on human life and earth systems, can empower them to act, individually or collectively, to promote behavioral changes aiming to reduce pollutants’ emissions. Overall, this book gathers fourteen innovative studies that provide new insights regarding these important topics within the scope of human exposure to air pollution. A total of five main areas were discussed and explored within this book and, hopefully, can contribute to the advance of knowledge in this field.

Environmental health researchers have long used concepts like the neighborhood effect to assessing people’s exposure to environmental influences and the associated health impact. However, these are static notions that ignore people’s daily mobility at various spatial and temporal scales (e.g., daily travel, migratory movements, and movements over the life course) and the influence of neighborhood contexts outside their residential neighborhoods. Recent studies have started to incorporate human mobility, non-residential neighborhoods, and the temporality of exposures through collecting and using data from GPS, accelerometers, mobile phones, various types of sensors, and social media. Innovative approaches and methods have been developed. This Special Issue aims to showcase studies that use new approaches, methods, and data to examine the role of human mobility and non-residential contexts on human health behaviors and outcomes. It includes 21 articles that cover a wide range of topics, including individual exposure to air pollution, exposure and access to green spaces, spatial access to healthcare services, environmental influences on physical activity, food environmental and diet behavior, exposure to noise and its impact on mental health, and broader methodological issues such as the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) and the neighborhood effect averaging problem (NEAP). This collection will be a valuable reference for scholars and students interested in recent advances in the concepts and methods in environmental health and health geography.

Finishing this book is giving me a mixture of relief, satisfaction and frus tration. Relief, for the completion of a project that has taken too many of my evenings and weekends and that, in the last several months, has become almost an obsession. Satisfaction, for the optimistic feeling that this book, in spite of its many shortcomings and imbalances, will be of some help to the air pollution scientific community. Frustration, for the impossibility of incorporating newly available material that would require another major review of several key chap ters - an effort that is currently beyond my energies but not beyond my desires. The first canovaccio of this book came out in 1980 when I was invited by Computational Mechanics in the United Kingdom to give my first Air Pollution Modeling course. The course material, in the form of transparencies, expanded, year after year, thus providing a growing working basis. In 1985, the ECC Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy, asked me to prepare a critical survey of mathe matical models of atmospheric pollution, transport and deposition. This support gave me the opportunity to prepare a sort of "first draft" of the book, which I expanded in the following years.

Mathematical probability and statistics are an attractive, thriving, and respectable part of mathematics. Some mathematicians and philosophers of science say they are the gateway to mathematics’ deepest mysteries. Moreover, mathematical statistics denotes an accumulation of mathematical discussions connected with efforts to most efficiently collect and use numerical data subject to random or deterministic variations. Currently, the concept of probability and mathematical statistics has become one of the fundamental notions of modern science and the philosophy of nature. This book is an illustration of the use of mathematics to solve specific problems in engineering, statistics, and science in general.