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

In this project, we investigated the relationship between wind speed and atmospheric pollution concentration by looking at experimental and real-world data. For our experimental data, we had flume tank videos provided by FSU’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute. A plume of dyed liquid was released into the flume to represent air pollution. We analyzed these videos by taking 20 frames, separating them into light, medium, and dark red pixels, plotting them with Python’s PyPlot package, and conducting several t-tests. All of this pointed to an inverse relationship between wind speed and air pollution concentration (i.e. lower wind speeds result in higher air pollution concentrations and vice versa). For our real-world analysis, we collected wind speed and air quality index (AQI) data for three pairs of cities across the United States: Tallahassee and Orlando, Boston and Philadelphia, and Los Angeles and San Francisco. All pairs were similar in climate, urbanization, and region, but had different wind speeds. For each pair, we conducted t-tests that showed that, for two out of the three pairs, there was a significant difference between their wind speeds and AQIs (suggesting they are related). Finally, we also plotted AQI vs. wind speed data for each city, which again showed an inverse relationship between wind speed and air pollution. More research needs to be conducted with larger samples of real-world data, but this study does serve as an initial step towards discovering the factors that affect the dispersion of air pollution.