Project #10 Sousveillance Tool - PM2.5 Parallax
Background
I have always been concerned about environmental or climate issues. I have lived in Beijing for almost 20 years. In this decade, northern China was known for its serious air pollution problems.
At that time we learned about an important measure of air quality, PM2.5 (Particulate Matter 2.5).
Here is more information about PM2.5 including health impacts: New York State Department of Health
Looking up PM2.5 became a daily checklist to decide whether or not to wear a mask outside (see, wearing a mask is not something new to us). Even many outdoor activities would be canceled because the PM2.5 index was too high.
I remember when I was in high school, the sky was often a warm gray color, visibility was low, and I could smell an unpleasant odor.
The interesting thing is that we will look up different values on different platforms. Some of the common ones are the Beijing Meteorological Service, or the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (The U.S. Embassy set up its equipment for environmental monitoring and publicly released the values).
The U.S. Embassy's values are often slightly higher than those of the Meteorological Service, which casts our doubt on the accuracy of official data. Did the National Weather Service intend to lower the data?
Although the matter has never been confirmed, people prefer to trust the data from the U.S. Embassy. Today such a difference goes unnoticed, but a decade ago in China, in a particular political environment, it was indeed widely discussed.
Design Process
I found the API for both sides PM2.5 data.
The U.S. Embassy: History Data
AirNow (US): Real-time Data
AirNow API: API Page
Chinese Official Weather Real-time Data: PM25.in
Since the above service did not offer me the API, I changed another one:
Chinese Official Weather Real-time Data #2: 天气API
I mapped the value of PM2.5 into the value of color. If there is a color difference in the background from top to bottom, it means that there is a difference in the obtained data.
The more pronounced the color difference, the greater the difference in the data is indicated. The Beijing map color in the middle is an average of the two.
The reason I designed the overall visual contrast to be so low is that this is exactly how the haze gives us the physical feeling.
Reflection
As I was working on this sketch, I realized that the Beijing Meteorological Bureau's data was still generally lower than the U.S. Embassy's monitoring data. It remains unchanged from a decade ago. I searched for reports asking why official data is always "inaccurate" (people always trust third-party data), but there were no exact answers. China has a special principle of political transparency, and the pm2.5 index is closely related to the economic development of industrial production. Thus it leads to some standards that are always ambiguous. But these values are much closer to each individual citizen, and the government has no right to deprive people of their right to know and their health. And that is what my sousveillance tool is trying to monitor, trying to state.