scholarly journals The Status of Air Quality in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Remote Sensing Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 369
Author(s):  
Yasin F. Elshorbany ◽  
Hannah C. Kapper ◽  
Jerald R. Ziemke ◽  
Scott A. Parr
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Remote Sensing ◽  
New York ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pollution Source ◽  
Traffic Volume ◽  
Industrial Emissions ◽  
High Traffic Volume

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has prompted global governments to take several measures to limit and contain the spread of the novel virus. In the United States (US), most states have imposed a partial to complete lockdown that has led to decreased traffic volumes and reduced vehicle emissions. In this study, we investigate the impacts of the pandemic-related lockdown on air quality in the US using remote sensing products for nitrogen dioxide tropospheric column (NO2), carbon monoxide atmospheric column (CO), tropospheric ozone column (O3), and aerosol optical depth (AOD). We focus on states with distinctive anomalies and high traffic volume, New York (NY), Illinois (IL), Florida (FL), Texas (TX), and California (CA). We evaluate the effectiveness of reduced traffic volume to improve air quality by comparing the significant reductions during the pandemic to the interannual variability (IAV) of a respective reference period for each pollutant. We also investigate and address the potential factors that might have contributed to changes in air quality during the pandemic. As a result of the lockdown and the significant reduction in traffic volume, there have been reductions in CO and NO2. These reductions were, in many instances, compensated by local emissions and, or affected by meteorological conditions. Ozone was reduced by varying magnitude in all cases related to the decrease or increase of NO2 concentrations, depending on ozone photochemical sensitivity. Regarding the policy impacts of this large-scale experiment, our results indicate that reduction of traffic volume during the pandemic was effective in improving air quality in regions where traffic is the main pollution source, such as in New York City and FL, while was not effective in reducing pollution events where other pollution sources dominate, such as in IL, TX and CA. Therefore, policies to reduce other emissions sources (e.g., industrial emissions) should also be considered, especially in places where the reduction in traffic volume was not effective in improving air quality (AQ).

Legacies of War

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard G. Wilshire ◽  
Richard W. Hazlett ◽  
Jane E. Nielson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Military Training ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Foreign Wars ◽  
The U.S

Since 1900, United States troops have fought in more foreign conflicts than any other nation on Earth. Most Americans supported those actions, believing that they would keep the scourge of war far from our homes. But the strategy seems to have failed—it certainly did not prevent terror attacks against the U.S. mainland. The savage Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. were not the first to inflict war damage in America’s 48 contiguous states, however—nor were they the first warlike actions to harm innocent citizens since the Civil War. Paradoxically, making war abroad has always required practicing warfare in our own back yards. Today’s large, mechanized military training exercises have degraded U.S. soils, water supplies, and wildlife habitats in the same ways that the real wars affected war-torn lands far away. The saddest fact of all is that the deadly components of some weapons in the U.S. arsenal never found use in foreign wars but have attacked U.S. citizens in their own homes and communities. The relatively egalitarian universal service of World War II left a whole generation of Americans with nostalgia and reverence for military service. Many of us, perhaps the majority, might argue that human and environmental sacrifices are the price we must be willing to pay to protect our interests and future security. A current political philosophy proposes that the United States must even start foreign wars to protect Americans and their homes. But Americans are not fully aware of all the past sacrifices—and what we don’t know can hurt us. Even decades-old impacts from military training still degrade land and contaminate air and water, particularly in the arid western states, and will continue to do so far into the future. Exploded and unexploded bombs, mines, and shells (“ordnance,” in military terms) and haphazard disposal sites still litter former training lands in western states. And large portions of the western United States remain playgrounds for war games, subject to large-scale, highly mechanized military operations for maintaining combat readiness and projecting American power abroad.

A New American Jewish World

1998 ◽  
pp. 294-297
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter shows how the battles over the Pittsburgh Platform were being fought over a terrain which other factors were already transforming. Large-scale migration from Eastern Europe had begun. The number of Jews in the United States, estimated at 250,000 in 1880, reached the million mark in 1900, the year of Wise’s death. The acculturated community, speaking English albeit with a German accent, largely middle class, reformed in religion, was outnumbered by one that spoke Yiddish, belonged to the proletariat, and was untouched by Reform Judaism. The processes which Wise saw at work when he arrived in 1846 had to begin over again; but although many of the factors were similar, the answers were not necessarily the same. Incidentally, the presence of a second and larger Jewish community enhanced the importance of New York in American Jewish life and diminished the significance of Cincinnati and other Midwest communities where Wise had held sway.

scholarly journals In Search of Covariates of HIV-1 Subtype B Spread in the United States—A Cautionary Tale of Large-Scale Bayesian Phylogeography

Viruses ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel L. Hong ◽  
Simon Dellicour ◽  
Bram Vrancken ◽  
Marc A. Suchard ◽  
Michael T. Pyne ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Resistance Testing ◽  
Western World ◽  
Phylogenetic Structure ◽  
Subtype B ◽  
The Us ◽  
Hiv 1

Infections with HIV-1 group M subtype B viruses account for the majority of the HIV epidemic in the Western world. Phylogeographic studies have placed the introduction of subtype B in the United States in New York around 1970, where it grew into a major source of spread. Currently, it is estimated that over one million people are living with HIV in the US and that most are infected with subtype B variants. Here, we aim to identify the drivers of HIV-1 subtype B dispersal in the United States by analyzing a collection of 23,588 pol sequences, collected for drug resistance testing from 45 states during 2004–2011. To this end, we introduce a workflow to reduce this large collection of data to more computationally-manageable sample sizes and apply the BEAST framework to test which covariates associate with the spread of HIV-1 across state borders. Our results show that we are able to consistently identify certain predictors of spread under reasonable run times across datasets of up to 10,000 sequences. However, the general lack of phylogenetic structure and the high uncertainty associated with HIV trees make it difficult to interpret the epidemiological relevance of the drivers of spread we are able to identify. While the workflow we present here could be applied to other virus datasets of a similar scale, the characteristic star-like shape of HIV-1 phylogenies poses a serious obstacle to reconstructing a detailed evolutionary and spatial history for HIV-1 subtype B in the US.

scholarly journals Land cover change impacts on atmospheric chemistry: simulating projected large-scale tree mortality in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 2323-2340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Geddes ◽  
Colette L. Heald ◽  
Sam J. Silva ◽  
Randall V. Martin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Land Cover Change ◽  
Dry Deposition ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Tree Mortality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Tropospheric Chemistry

Abstract. Land use and land cover changes impact climate and air quality by altering the exchange of trace gases between the Earth's surface and atmosphere. Large-scale tree mortality that is projected to occur across the United States as a result of insect and disease may therefore have unexplored consequences for tropospheric chemistry. We develop a land use module for the GEOS-Chem global chemical transport model to facilitate simulations involving changes to the land surface, and to improve consistency across land–atmosphere exchange processes. The model is used to test the impact of projected national-scale tree mortality risk through 2027 estimated by the 2012 USDA Forest Service National Insect and Disease Risk Assessment. Changes in biogenic emissions alone decrease monthly mean O3 by up to 0.4 ppb, but reductions in deposition velocity compensate or exceed the effects of emissions yielding a net increase in O3 of more than 1 ppb in some areas. The O3 response to the projected change in emissions is affected by the ratio of baseline NOx : VOC concentrations, suggesting that in addition to the degree of land cover change, tree mortality impacts depend on whether a region is NOx-limited or NOx-saturated. Consequently, air quality (as diagnosed by the number of days that 8 h average O3 exceeds 70 ppb) improves in polluted environments where changes in emissions are more important than changes to dry deposition, but worsens in clean environments where changes to dry deposition are the more important term. The influence of changes in dry deposition demonstrated here underscores the need to evaluate treatments of this physical process in models. Biogenic secondary organic aerosol loadings are significantly affected across the US, decreasing by 5–10 % across many regions, and by more than 25 % locally. Tree mortality could therefore impact background aerosol loadings by between 0.5 and 2 µg m−3. Changes to reactive nitrogen oxide abundance and partitioning are also locally important. The regional effects simulated here are similar in magnitude to other scenarios that consider future biofuel cropping or natural succession, further demonstrating that biosphere–atmosphere exchange should be considered when predicting future air quality and climate. We point to important uncertainties and further development that should be addressed for a more robust understanding of land cover change feedbacks.

Rising with the Sun

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-40
Author(s):  
Vincent DiGirolamo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Slave Revolts

Poverty and politics spawned the emergence of newsboys in antebellum New York. The New York Sun, founded in 1833 by the radical printer Benjamin Day, was the first successful penny newspaper in the United States and the first to use hawkers and carriers on a large scale. Before this date, newspapers circulated through the colonies and early republic via carriers and postriders of various ages and conditions, including apprentices and slaves. Day’s newsboys—many of them poor immigrants—earned both wages and profits as they served Whigs, Democrats, and members of Day’s own Workingmen’s Party. This generation of newsboys did not simply distribute newspapers but stirred up demand for them with their cries of murders, hoaxes, and slave revolts. Their ranks included future turfman Bill Lovell, actor-comedian Barney Williams, and entrepreneur Mark Maguire, the original “King of the Newsboys.”

scholarly journals Multi-criteria parameter estimation for the unified land model

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 4417-4463 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Livneh ◽  
D. P. Lettenmaier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Parameter Estimation ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Limiting Factor ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
United States Geological Survey ◽  
Skill Scores

Abstract. We describe a parameter estimation framework for the Unified Land Model (ULM) that utilizes multiple independent data sets over the Continental United States. These include a satellite-based evapotranspiration (ET) product based on MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Geostationary Operation Environmental Satellites (GOES) imagery, an atmospheric-water balance based ET estimate that utilizes North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) atmospheric fields, terrestrial water storage content (TWSC) data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), and streamflow (Q) primarily from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) stream gauges. The study domain includes 10 large-scale (≥105 km2) river basins and 250 smaller-scale (<104 km2) tributary basins. ULM, which is essentially a merger of the Noah Land Surface Model and Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting model, is the basis for these experiments. Calibrations were made using each of the criteria individually, in addition to combinations of multiple criteria, with multi-criteria skill scores computed for all cases. At large-scales calibration to Q resulted in the best overall performance, whereas certain combinations of ET and TWSC calibrations lead to large errors in other criteria. At small scales, about one-third of the basins had their highest Q performance from multi-criteria calibrations (to Q and ET) suggesting that traditional calibration to Q may benefit by supplementing observed Q with remote sensing estimates of ET. Model streamflow errors using optimized parameters were mostly due to over (under) estimation of low (high) flows. Overall, uncertainties in remote-sensing data proved to be a limiting factor in the utility of multi-criteria parameter estimation.

scholarly journals Land cover change impacts on atmospheric chemistry: simulating projected large-scale tree mortality in the United States

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (20) ◽  
pp. 29303-29345
Author(s):  
J. A. Geddes ◽  
C. L. Heald ◽  
S. J. Silva ◽  
R. V. Martin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Land Cover Change ◽  
Dry Deposition ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Tree Mortality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Tropospheric Chemistry

Abstract. Land use and land cover changes impact climate and air quality by altering the exchange of trace gases between the Earth's surface and atmosphere. Large-scale tree mortality that is projected to occur across the United States as a result of insect and disease may therefore have unexplored consequences for tropospheric chemistry. We develop a land use module for the GEOS-Chem global chemical transport model to facilitate simulations involving changes to the land surface, and to improve consistency across land–atmosphere exchange processes. The model is used to test the impact of projected national-scale tree mortality risk through 2027 estimated by the 2012 USDA Forest Service National Insect and Disease Risk Assessment. Changes in biogenic emissions alone decrease monthly mean O3 by up to 0.4 ppb, but reductions in deposition velocity compensate or exceed the effects of emissions yielding a net increase in O3 of more than 1 ppb in some areas. The O3 response to emissions is controlled by the ratio of baseline NOx : VOC concentrations, suggesting that in addition to the degree of land cover change, tree mortality impacts depend on whether a region is NOx-limited or NOx-saturated. Consequently, air quality (as diagnosed by the number of days that average 8 h O3 exceeds 65 ppb) improves in polluted environments where changes in emissions are more important than changes to dry deposition, but worsens in clean environments where changes to dry deposition are the more important term. Biogenic secondary organic aerosol loadings are significantly affected across the US, decreasing by 5–10 % across many regions, and by more than 25 % locally. Tree mortality could therefore impact background aerosol loadings by between 0.5 to 2 μg m−3. Changes to reactive nitrogen oxide abundance and partitioning are also locally important. These simulations suggest that changes in biosphere–atmosphere exchange must be considered when predicting future air quality and climate. We point to important uncertainties and further development that should be addressed for a more robust understanding of land cover change feedbacks.

scholarly journals Seroprevalence of Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in Six Sites in the United States, March 23-May 3, 2020

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona P. Havers ◽  
Carrie Reed ◽  
Travis Lim ◽  
Joel M. Montgomery ◽  
John D. Klena ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Florida ◽  
Spike Protein ◽  
Specimen Collection

AbstractImportanceReported cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection likely underestimate the prevalence of infection in affected communities. Large-scale seroprevalence studies provide better estimates of the proportion of the population previously infected.ObjectiveTo estimate prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in convenience samples from several geographic sites in the United States.DesignSerologic testing of convenience samples using residual sera obtained for routine clinical testing by two commercial laboratory companies.SettingConnecticut (CT), south Florida (FL), Missouri (MO), New York City metro region (NYC), Utah (UT), and Washington State’s (WA) Puget Sound region.ParticipantsPersons of all ages with serum collected during intervals from March 23 through May 3, 2020.ExposureSARS-CoV-2 virus infection.Main outcomes and measuresWe estimated the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein using an ELISA assay. We standardized estimates to the site populations by age and sex. Estimates were adjusted for test performance characteristics (96.0% sensitivity and 99.3% specificity). We estimated the number of infections in each site by extrapolating seroprevalence to site populations. We compared estimated infections to number of reported COVID-19 cases as of last specimen collection date.ResultsWe tested sera from 11,933 persons. Adjusted estimates of the proportion of persons seroreactive to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein ranged from 1.13% (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.70-1.94) in WA to 6.93% (95% CI 5.02-8.92) in NYC (collected March 23-April 1). For sites with later collection dates, estimates ranged from 1.85% (95% CI 1.00-3.23, collected April 6-10) for FL to 4.94% (95% CI 3.61-6.52) for CT (April 26-May 3). The estimated number of infections ranged from 6 to 24 times the number of reported cases in each site.Conclusions and relevanceOur seroprevalence estimates suggest that for five of six U.S. sites, from late March to early May 2020, >10 times more SARS-CoV-2 infections occurred than the number of reported cases. Seroprevalence and under-ascertainment varied by site and specimen collection period. Most specimens from each site had no evidence of antibody to SARS-CoV-2. Tracking population seroprevalence serially, in a variety of specific geographic sites, will inform models of transmission dynamics and guide future community-wide public health measures.Key findingsQuestionWhat proportion of persons in six U.S. sites had detectable antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, March 23-May 3, 2020?FindingsWe tested 11,933 residual clinical specimens. We estimate that from 1.1% of persons in the Puget Sound to 6.9% in New York City (collected March 23-April 1) had detectable antibodies. Estimates ranged from 1.9% in south Florida to 4.9% in Connecticut with specimens collected during intervals from April 6-May 3. Six to 24 times more infections were estimated per site with seroprevalence than with case report data.MeaningFor most sites, evidence suggests >10 times more SARS-CoV-2 infections occurred than reported cases. Most persons in each site likely had no detectable SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.

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