Health Canada Air Pollution Data Availability Visualization

This map was developed for internal use and thus is less intuitive than the others. The purpose of this map is for researchers in the office at St. Michael's Hospital to understand where pollution data exists across Canada.

Problem At Hand

Researchers and statisticians in the office were tasked to run complex spatial prediction models on pollution levels in different cities. These models are extremely time-consuming and could take up to 7 days to run for one city. Unfortunately, data collection efforts over the past 20 years were inconsistent, highly dependent on locations, and varied greatly by pollutants. The result of a model is less useful if insufficient data were collected to train the odels. In order to help statisticians conduct research efficiently and prioritize cities with the richest amount of data, this visualization was born.

Functionalities

• Red dots are Health Canada air pollution stations. Locations of stations vary by year
• Tags across the bottom panel allows you to zoom to a new city without knowledge of Canadian geographies.
• Time slider on the top left hand corner allows you to view data availability across the years.
• Pollutant on the top right hand corner allows you to check data avialbility for each pollutant. The number represents aggregated pollutant measurement in a given year, enabling users to gain a basic understanding of severity of pollution for each pollutant at any station.