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Activities: Traffic, nitrogen oxide and ozone analysis in your townInvestigate how much traffic is observable in your town and if you find links to the concentrations of nitrogen oxides and ozone. How do they change during the day?
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Background: There are links between the traffic in the streets, the local weather situation and the concentrations of nitrogen oxides (NO, NO2) and ozone in the towns and the suburbs of the town. If your school is close to a station of the local air quality network, we encourage you to investigate the traffic intensity and the concentration of air pollutants in the streets near to your school. Material and conditions: Ideal conditions would be if the school had one or even more mobile ozone detectors available. |
If you are used to working in geography with geographic information systems (GIS), you may develop a small map of the traffic intensity for different times of the day and use this in a GIS software. For this you need geo-referenced maps from your region. If you do not have access to them, you may work for example with Google Earth. If a “field experiment” is not possible during the classes, you may also work with data from stations in your region and analyse them in the classroom as shown in the example below. |
Objective: |
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What has to be considered? If the measurement point for ozone is next to a busy street it is likely that local ozone is depleted by the NO emissions from traffic. Such stations are suitable for the parallel analysis of nitrogen oxide data and comparison of data from traffic counting. If the measurement point for ozone is in a housing area or a suburb it is likely that the role of local traffic is minor. If you choose places for traffic counting, consider major streets in the vicinity, but do not expect a strong dependence. Please consider the wind direction. Choose places for the traffic counting which are located in a way that the wind blows from the street where you count cars to the measurement point. |