A Steep Climb to Cleaner Air in South Asia
NASA atmospheric scientists and the SERVIR program are working to help keep communities breathing easy in the Hindu Kush and Himalayan mountain ranges.
5 results
NASA atmospheric scientists and the SERVIR program are working to help keep communities breathing easy in the Hindu Kush and Himalayan mountain ranges.
Air quality is a significant challenge for Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), a high mountain region of South Asia, where it frequently reaches unhealthy to hazardous levels. New SERVIR HKH web and mobile tools developed through crowdsourcing aim to help public health and environmental managers monitor and forecast air quality for this region.
|Trista Brophy Cerquera (Former NASA Applied Sciences Intern), Elissa Fielding (NASA Earth Action Intern), Shobhana Gupta, MD, PhD (NASA Applied Sciences)
SERVIR-HKH has developed the Air Quality Explorer for the HKH using freely available satellite data and the Google Earth Engine platform. The application allows visualization of three atmospheric parameters — nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2), and Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) — for any chosen period and location.
The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) has been implementing the SERVIR-HKH Initiative — one of five regional hubs of the SERVIR network — in its Regional Member Countries, prioritizing capacity building and science activities in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan.
This service improves air quality monitoring through a web-based dashboard that was developed that utilizes publicly available observation data, satellite-based remote sensing products, and atmospheric models.