Experimental and Real-World Analysis of the Relationship Between Wind Speed and Atmospheric Pollution Concentration

Through many recent fluctuations in expanding industry and other natural causes, air quality has seen a decline which may detrimentally affect the health of populations. Recent studies have also shown both the speeding up and slowing down of wind in certain regions of the world, due to both natural climate cycles and global warming. These correlations between wind speed and AQI, or air quality index, were examined using experimental water flume video data gathered by FSU’s Geophysical Institute and real-world wind speed and AQI data. These experiments were analyzed using Python computer vision techniques and heuristically calculated dark pixel concentrations were compared between trials with flume speeds of 0.04 m/s and 0.15 m/s. In terms of real-world data, 3 pairs of cities were selected and their monthly wind speed and AQI data were gathered for the year 2019 using online repositories. Using two-sample t-tests, we found a statistically significant difference between the dark pixel concentrations between the two flume speeds combined with a decrease in the mean dark pixel concentration with an increase in flume speed, which represents more dispersion of particles with higher flume speeds. Using the same method, a statistically significant difference was also found between the wind speeds and the AQIs for 2 out of the 3 pairs of cities that were analyzed combined with an inverse relationship between mean wind speed and mean AQI being found for all pairs of cities. These results do indeed show that there is a negative correlation between wind speed and AQI, and the data collected serves as a good warning sign as to the future that might be without science delving deeper into the topic.