Outdoor air pollution in the United States monitored and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency as well as many state and local environmental agencies. Since the introduction of the Clean Air Act in 1970, a major goal has been to reduce the levels of outdoor air pollution so that we can maintain an adequate margin of safety with respect to protecting public health.
So how are we doing? This is a question that can be asked and answered in a variety of ways and different stakeholders (i.e. policy-makers, scientists, state and local regulators) may have different levels of interest in specific questions.
The goal of this project is to take the EPA's comprehensive database of air pollution monitoring information and to tell a coherent story about how outdoor air pollution has changed over time and space in the United States. In this project you will examine a pair of "criteria pollutants", which are air pollutants for which national ambient air quality standards have been developed.
The two pollutants that you will focus on in this project are O3 (ozone) and PM10 (coarse particulate matter).
Data for outdoor air pollution monitoring is collected by the Environmental Protection Agency and is made available through the EPA's Air Quality System (AQS). We have mirrored the EPA's web site on Coursera so please DO NOT download the data from the EPA site. You can download the data from the Coursera site directly at [URL].
The goal of national ambient air quality standards is to set maximum levels at which the pollutants can be found in the air. However, in many locations in the U.S. air pollution levels exceed the standards and thus those locations are in "non-attainment".
For this project, you need to develop a data product that answers the following questions
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Given that various air quality control measures have been implemented across the country, can we observe whether air pollution levels have decreased over time?
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In which counties are air pollution levels decreasing the fastest? In which counties are they decreasing the slowest?
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Which counties and states are in attainment of the air quality standards which are in non-attainment?
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Write a set of R functions that scrapes the necessary pollution data from the web and arranges the dataset in appropriate directories