Air Quality Index Tool

For this year's Earth Day, I wanted to bring awareness to air quality in major US metro areas. Here in DC, we had some days last summer where the air quality was so bad that we were discouraged from going outside. Due to a particularly dry, hot, and windy season in Canada, wildfires raged in Quebec during the month of June. While wildfire smoke from Canada has drifted to the northeastern US for the past few summers, it is usually so high in the atmosphere that we don't notice. In 2023 however, it was right in our faces.

So, how was the air quality in 2023? Poke around on the visualization below to find out!

I made this dashboard using data from the EPA. They have air quality datasets publicly available on their website here. However, when I downloaded the 2023 dataset, I noticed that it only had data until October. Since I wanted to make the Month/Day graphic on the right hand side, I had to find another way to get all of the 2023 data. I ended up manually compiling datasets found here. I had to submit a query for each metro area, and I ended up with around 30 datasets. I started out by selecting the top 20~ish most populated metro areas I could find on the list, and then I added some additional datasets for places I was interested in, or places where my friends lived. After gathering all the datasets, I wrote a python script to compile them and add some additional information on the locations and AQI score (State, City, AQI Category). The code for this can be found on my Kaggle account.

If you want to see the data for a metro area I haven't included, let me know! It can easily be added to the dataset through the compiler on Kaggle. Downloading the datasets is a manual process, but this project is very scalable. Hopefully the EPA will publish their own fully compiled 2023 dataset soon so this manual process is eliminated! I will be on the lookout for it, and replace the dataset once it is available.

If you read this far, thank you for reading! Until next time~