Science On a Sphere Pandemic and Air Quality Live Program

The Science On a Sphere (SOS) team recently released the live program, “The Pandemic & Air Quality,” after presenting at the SOS Users Collaborative Network Workshop in August. The program identified key relationships between the societal response to the pandemic and the air quality implications. SOS technology was a key component of this investigation and was used to display critical visualizations in scientific storytelling. The program is also available as an ESRI story map and an SOS Explorer mobile tour.

Science On a Sphere® uses computers and video projectors to display planetary data onto a six-foot diameter sphere, analogous to a giant animated globe. A flat-screen version, called SOS Explorer, can also be used on mobile devices and in research and educational contexts. The Science On a Sphere team is part of the NOAA Department of Education and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), with visualization contributions by GSL.

NOAA’s SOS investigation sought to understand how major societal changes during the pandemic impacted the atmosphere. The team examined data and created visualizations from the first six months of 2020 to offer a unique and interactive way of visualizing these changes and understanding trends.
SOS visualized different factors during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the spread of virus cases and the timing of associated government lockdown restrictions around the globe. It also visualized changes in travel and shipping, reflecting the economic impacts of the pandemic. Visualizations showed how decreasing commuter car and air traffic briefly decreased air pollution and emissions. Shipping on the other hand, as seen in the image below, did not change much before and after lockdown restrictions.

SOS also identified shifts in atmospheric nitrogen dioxide, air quality index, aerosols, and carbon dioxide. The visualizations offered a first-hand understanding of how air pollution is impacted by societal behavior as well as which species of air quality change rapidly and which do not. For example, nitrogen dioxide concentrations dropped as soon as lockdown restrictions kept many people home, whereas, carbon dioxide concentrations did not measurably change.

“While no one would look to a global health crisis as a playbook for environmental action, there are things we can learn from observations taken during this time. These datasets give us important windows into which aspects of our global economy and society we can change quickly – driving cars, flying on airplanes – and which – like shipping and manufacturing – are much harder to change. In a world where we are facing increasing challenges related to our changing climate, these datasets also show how the environment responds to changes in human activities.”

The Science On a Sphere team helped develop an engaging, easily digestible investigation of NOAA’s efforts to study the effects of COVID-19 on the atmosphere. SOS and SOSx continue to boost science literacy and engagement with the data that impacts our daily lives.