How has quarantine/COVID-19 restrictions affected air quality in New York City?

Nicole Gonik, Teon Williams, Abhinav Yadav, and Duke Yao.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City became a lot less busy, and we were curious as to how this may have affected the air quality of the city. Air quality and air pollution are important topics of study because they affect the health and quality of life of residents. This greatly pertains to us New Yorkers because we live in one of the most urban areas in the world, and we are constantly surrounded by machines that contribute much to our daily lives but also pollute the air we breathe. To gather data, we looked at measurements of air pollutants in NYC from before the pandemic, looking at different years to track pre-pandemic trends, and then compared those with measurements of air quality throughout the COVID-19 restrictions period. The primary pollutant that we focused on was PM2.5 (a type of airborne pollutant that is generated through combustion processes, which can easily enter our lungs, damage our airways, and over time cause respiratory and heart disease). However, we also looked at data for other pollutants, such as ozone and nitrogen dioxide. We retrieved measurements from multiple public databases that measured air quality in different regions of the city, to make sure that our data was city-wide and was not biased towards a particular area/neighborhood.

From our research, we found that while NYC air quality has improved during the pandemic, it has been improving in general since the early 2000’s. We also learned that air quality tends to improve during the spring and fall as compared to winter and spring, so the initial drop in PM2.5 levels observed in March may be not only the result of pandemic restrictions, but also of that general trend. Therefore, we concluded that while quarantine restrictions have correlated to an improvement of NYC air quality, we cannot consider quarantine to be the sole reason behind this improvement. Finally, we looked at several potential solutions for how positive changes in air quality can be maintained in the future; from outlawing polluting boiler fuels to eliminating costly, ineffective, and polluting “peaker” energy plants.

You can find our full research project here.