'They grounded the drones, correct?' from the helicopter. Our novel analytical approach adds new estimates for NO 2 to the health burden and supports additional motivation to move away from fossil fuel-based combustion sources of air pollution to protect public health,' says Arunachalam.'If you can see the helicopter, he is hovering over the site.' 'Most of the air pollution related health risk studies focus on PM 2.5. The research team is hopeful this new approach can help in identifying vulnerable populations, quantifying exposure and preventing misclassification of exposures going forward. 'Detecting these small areas, and visualizing their exposure inequities, provides critical new insight to inform and prioritize remediation strategies.' 'Our results reveal that significant exposure inequities can occur within areas as small as a county, or even within a census tract,' says co-author Marc Serre, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering in UNC's Gillings School of Global Public Health. They also could see how changes in modeled resolution can contribute to the inequality, providing key insights for developing mitigation strategies.

The hybrid model allowed the research team to assess communities at a high resolution, layered with census and health data, which provided both quantification and visualization of the pervasive and disproportionate exposure of minority communities. student in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and former graduate research assistant at the UNC Institute for the Environment.

Specifically, vulnerable minority communities face a greater burden of pollutants, resulting in a higher risk for adverse health outcomes,' says Alejandro Valencia, a co-author and former Ph.D. However, our findings also highlight an important disparity in exposure between white communities and minority communities within this proximity. 'Our research confirms that all communities residing within 100 meters of major roads experience elevated levels of PM 2.5 and NO 2. Their model estimates 264,516 premature deaths from PM 2.5 and 138,550 from NO 2 due to all sources in the U.S. Using a novel hybrid data fusion model, the research team was able to generate a more accurate assessment of the health risks of these pollutants compared to previous studies at a census block resolution across the more than 11 million census blocks in the United States. We use this very high-resolution estimate of health risk to quantify exposure inequalities,' says Saravanan Arunachalam, corresponding author of the study, and research professor and deputy director at the UNC Institute for the Environment. 'This is the first time that a nationwide estimate of health risk due to both PM 2.5 and NO 2 is made for every census block in the entire nation using a very sophisticated hybrid modeling approach that accounts for model biases. The study was published today in PLOS ONE. A new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill estimates minority communities within 100 meters of a major roadway are exposed to up to 15% more PM 2.5 and up to 35% more NO 2 than white communities from traffic-related air pollution.

Traffic conditions near me