A map of global air pollution

Those clever scientist types over at Earth Observatory have put together a neat map of global air pollution.

This is an important issue and there are a number of excellent papers coming out (and have been recently published) in this area.

I will be dedicating a number of posts to this topic in the coming weeks and months.

This map of course uses interpolation and some other trickery to come up these estimates of premature death but the numbers are unlikely to be too far out - I need to dig into this a little more now.

Industrial pollution is China is a serious issue and is where I am currently focusing some research time.

The link which I am calling the Map of death has more information.

A good headline is:

"In 2013, they published their results in Environmental Research Letters, concluding that 2.1 million deaths occur worldwide each year as a direct result of a toxic type of outdoor air pollution known as fine particulate matter (PM_2.5)."

There is clearly scope for additional research in this area.

References and live links:

Anenberg, S. et al, (2010, April 9) An Estimate of the Global Burden of Anthropogenic Ozone and 
Fine Particulate Matter on Premature Human Mortality Using 
Atmospheric Modeling. Environmental Health Perspectives, (118), 1189-1195. 

Discover (2013, July 17) Air Pollution Kills More Than 2 Million People Every Year. Accessed September 16, 2013.Institute of Physics (2013, July 12) Researchers estimate over two million deaths annually from air pollution. Accessed September 16, 2013.

Silva, R. et al, (2013, March 23) Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change. Environmental Research Letters, 8 (3).