Geography 470 Term Project Assessing Transborder Air Pollution at the Detroit-Windsor Border Crossing

Overview  We had access to some pollution data for the Detroit-Windsor border crossing area  From this we selected a 5-day period to examine the spatial and temporal variation of NO 2 concentrations  The significance of this is that little work has been done on border crossings but traffic crossing the border is increasing, and 50,000 people live within 2 km of the border crossing

Methodology  Import dBase table from Excel to ArcGIS  Scan in paper map  Digitize monitoring stations, and Georeferenced map  Convert pollution values to raster and then to TIN  Using 120 TINs create a movie using ArcScene and Corel Rave

Results  The greatest maximum hourly concentration values were obtained on Saturday, Sunday and Monday with the greatest average NO 2 concentrations were on Sunday and Monday

Results  Most of the highest hourly values for each day were recorded at the Detroit-Linwood site  This is approximately 6 km north of the border crossings and really does not allow us to reason that the pollution is originating from border crossing traffic

Results  Temporally the maximum daily NO 2 concentrations were obtained in the early morning or late evening  This can adequately be explained by the lack of photo-ionization during the night

To Wrap Up  No conclusions can accurately be drawn by our analysis as the time frame is short, 5 days, and because of the layout of the existing monitoring stations  If a more thorough analysis was desired it would be up to government bodies to strategically locate more monitoring stations