Air Pollution Patterns In New York City

Some preliminary analyses of data selected from three years of smoke shade and sulfur dioxide measurements from the forty air monitoring stations in New York City are presented. The purpose of these analyses is to investigate the spatial-temporal variation in concentration of these pollutants throughout the five boroughs of the city. Air pollution health effects studies in New York City have often used city-wide daily morbidity or mortality statistics and related them to air pollution levels obtained from a single monitoring station. The question of whether readings at one station in New York City can adequately represent the air pollution exposure for the population in the five boroughs is examined in this paper. Some samples of correlation matrices of daily pollution averages obtained from the forty air monitoring stations are presented to illustrate the day-to-day variation in pollution in various sections of New York City. It was found that interstation correlations are not high enough to justify the use of one central pollution measuring station as representative of a large metropolitan area. Sulfur dioxide correlates better between stations than smoke shade; this may reflect the different nature and spatial distribution of sources of the two pollutants. Close proximity of stations, or the fact that they were at similar heights above street or sea level did not necessarily lead to higher correlation coefficients.