Breathing in the Big Apple has never been so pleasant – but the bar is really low.
Opening your window at home within the borough is currently the freshest it has been in a decade, according to a new survey.
And yet, despite improvements, the New York metro area still ranks 12th among the cities surveyed in high-ozone days. Gothamist first reported,
The findings come from the New York City Community Air Survey, “the largest ongoing urban air monitoring program of any US city”. its website,
Published this month, the survey — a collaboration between the city’s health department and Queens College — is collecting air quality data from 2008 (and through the fall of 2021) in an effort to track changes, according to the “For Health Research.” risk can be predicted and communicated. public.”
The result of the project is a series of neatly formatted graphs, maps and blobs on the health department’s website, as well as encouraging assessments that, while still faring worse, NYC is far less likely than it was 15 years ago.
“New York is as clean as it has ever been,” said Dr. Roisin Earn told Gothamist, “I’m not saying it’s clean… I’m saying it’s a lot cleaner than it was before.” ,
“Cleaner than ever” means that concentrations of both the dangerous pollutants particulate matter 2.5 and nitrogen oxides have nearly halved, sulfur dioxide (which is produced when some fuel oils are burned) is almost non-existent and possibly As a result, asthma-related hospital visits are reduced.
(The concentration of compound ozone and asthma-related visits by very young children, however, has remained consistent.)
New Yorkers will be appalled to hear that the survey found variations in air quality by neighborhood, with the highest concentration of the pollutant particulate matter 2.5 in densely populated Midtown, Manhattan, followed by Greenwich Village and SoHo.