Information Visualization:
Final Project

Interactive Visualization:

The aim of this visualization is to show three different types of pollutants that are emitted across the United States. Data is taken from Kaggle.

Main Results:

The important observations that we found were:

• Pollution is wide-spread around the country for all three pollutant types, and is not limited to just urban or just rural areas.
• As time goes on, and you can aggregate data from over the years, you can cover more ground (literally!). This shows the importance of gathering data in large amounts and consistently. Each year on it's own does not have large amounts of wide-spread data, however, one can get a better sense of pollution in the United States when the data over the course of a few years is shown together.
• Overall, on state levels, the line graphs show that there have not been general trends towards reduced levels of pollutant output. While some pollutant levels increase steadily, others exhibit a decline, and these differ not only by pollutant but also within each state.

Highlights:

In our opinion, the best parts of our project are:

1. the ability to switch between county view and state-wide view
2. the different views available for the line graphs - this allows users to look at data on a few different scales

Pollutants Background:

• CO

Vehicles and machinery that use fossil fuels contribute the most to CO levels. CO can be harmful to health because it can reduce the amount of oxygen carried through blood to organs.

• O3

O3 is ozone, however there are two types. Good ozone, stratospheric ozone, occurs naturally and protexts the planet from ultraviolet sun rays. This is the ozone that is deteriorating, but that we need. Bad ozone is tropospheric, and is located more at ground level. Vehicles, power plants, refineries, and other sources of chemical reactions create O3 which leads to harmful effects on the lungs as well as vegetation and ecosystems. O3 is the main component in smog.

• SO2

Fossil fuels being used in large industrial facilities and plants contributes the most to SO2 levels. SO2 also affects the lungs and respiratory system. The growth of vegetation and ecosystems can be negatively affected. SO2 is a component in the haze that covers certain areas of the United States.