![]() ![]() The team discovered that cars may churn out as much as 95% of this harmful pollutant throughout the city at any one time. Henze and his colleagues took advantage of that situation by drawing on satellite images to track the ammonia concentrations in the air above Los Angeles before and during the lockdown of March 2020. In other words, the pandemic gave the researchers an accidental before and after picture-with a smoggy, car-filled Los Angeles on one side and a clearer, relatively empty urban area on the other. “Then the COVID lockdown suddenly provided us with a natural experiment.” Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder. “The tricky question has always been: How do we separate out ammonia concentrations owing to traffic from the ammonia emitted from sources like agriculture?” said Daven Henze, a co-author of the new study and professor in the Paul M. The study is the first to explore how vehicles churn out ammonia across an entire urban center using satellites in space. The researchers show that city vehicles may spew a lot more of these molecules than state and federal agencies have believed. Ammonia is a common pollutant that can react to form small particles in the air that are a major cause of respiratory and cardiovascular disease, especially in densely populated areas. 23 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, may spell bad news for a region that loves its cars. Lucky drivers were now, suddenly, able to make it from Burbank to Santa Monica at rush hour on the 101 and 405 in less than 50 minutes.Ī team of scientists led by CU Boulder are using the once-in-a-lifetime event to answer an unusual question: How much do vehicles in a city like Los Angeles add to the ammonia emissions that can hang in the air and sicken residents? As coronavirus cases popped up across California in March 2020, the previously impossible happened in Los Angeles County: The region’s normally bumper-to-bumper traffic slowed by roughly 24%. ![]()
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