From Seattle to Aarhus: Investigating how cruise ships affect air quality
Over the course of the past few weeks, ITK has been visited by Phd student Nussara Tieanklin, who is in town to conduct research on how visiting cruise ships affect local air quality.
Almost daily, tourists pass by Dokk1 on their way into town from the large cruise ships that are docking in Aarhus this season. Dokk1 too has had a visitor, all the way from Seattle. Nussara, who goes by Firn, is working on a research project together with the Aarhus City Lab team, regarding to the effects of cruise ship emissions on local air quality.
Firn is on the first year of a PhD at University of Washington, Seattle. The project is associated with Information and Communication Technology for Development Lab (ICTD) and falls under the moniker Computing For Social Good – in other words, applying data science towards increasing quality of life.
Aarhus is home to 35 city sensors, which collect high quality data on air quality and weather conditions, such as the City Probe sensors and weather stations like the one at the botanical gardens. Combined with data from DMI and cruise schedules, this gives a very accurate view of the air over Aarhus.
Part of what has drawn Firn to Aarhus is the city’s orientation towards open data, which makes it a very welcoming work environment for data science:
“You have data in your hands, and all of it speaks truth – you can improve almost anything with the right data. I really appreciate Open Data because it’s always a struggle to find and gain access to the right data.”
An example of this would be work done on the effects of air pollution on open air drivers in Thailand and leveraging data science to draw motorcyclists of an Uber-analogue away from highly polluted routes. Firn’s work in Aarhus specifically investigates the effects of cruise ship emissions in the form of particle pollution from benzine and other fuels and looking for correlations between the ships’ sizes, fuel types, docking schedules and increased particulates. A similar study was conducted by the Division of Air Quality last year for Juneau in Alaska, which is also a popular stop for cruise ships.
Data and source code for the project are available on Github.