In the air
Mizzou students work to improve the accuracy of pollution prediction
Undergraduates Jacob Meuth, Conor Henley, Jordan Parshall and Nichole Hillstrom are working on a project to improve air quality prediction as part of the NASA DEVELOP program. Photo by Verne Kaupp.
If you’ve been driving in a metropolitan area of the state, you might have seen the ozone alert signs along the highway. That information comes from data gleaned from approximately 190 ambient air quality monitoring instruments at 66 locations across the state.
Ozone in the upper atmosphere protects us. Ozone in the ambient air can trigger respiratory problems such as asthma and damage lung tissue.
Predicting the air quality, and making strides to improve it, hinges on complex calculations of all the available information.
Undergraduate researchers at Mizzou are working on a project they hope will make predicting air quality even more accurate. The students presented a poster session for interested senior policymakers at the Southern Workforce Summit June 3-5 in St. Louis.
Nichole Hillstrom, industrial engineering; Jordan Parshall, geography; Jacob Meuth, atmospheric sciences; and Conor Henley, English and geography, worked together on this air quality project through the NASA DEVELOP program in partnership with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The DEVELOP program engages students in scientific research that affects local policy issues.
“Any time you’re able to have a university student speak with senior public policy officials from the state or federal government, it’s a very valuable, unique experience for them,” faculty mentor Robert Reed says.
The faculty mentors for the project are Reed, associate research professor of civil and environmental engineering; Verne Kaupp, research professor in engineering and director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Research in Earth Science Technologies; and Tim Haithcoat, program director of the Missouri Spatial Data Information Service and the Geographic Resources Center.
“We’re available to help guide them, but the project is theirs. It’s theirs to create, to manipulate, to manage and to bring to fruition,” Kaupp says.
The project gathers information from NASA satellites and puts it in usable formats to be added to the algorithms the DNR uses to predict air quality. Hillstrom says results aren’t limited to Missouri — the project scales to the needs of other states.
Students have created the Geographic Information Systems framework, brought in data from ground sites and NASA satellites and made it available in a format accessible by the DNR.
The presentation at the conference completes phase one of the project; the undergraduate researchers should know in August whether the next phase of their project will be funded. In addition, Reed, Haithcoat and Kaupp have just finished preparing a proposal to NASA for three-year funding to continue the work started by this project.
“This student-led project is turning into a proof of concept for a proposal that we probably would not have otherwise written,” Kaupp says.