A New Tool to Quantify Air Pollution Detrimental to Health and Food Security in Rapidly Urbanising Cities

Air pollution has adverse effects on public health and food security. Fine particles (PM2.5) are breathed deep into lungs and ozone is a powerful oxidant harmful to humans and crops. Global studies that assess the threat of air pollution to health and crop productivity estimate that 5.5 million people die each year from exposure to PM2.5, and ozone pollution decreases annual crop yields by 79-121 million tonnes. In India crops lost to ozone damage could have fed 94 million people; 35% of the population living below the poverty line.

Cities in developing countries are expanding rapidly due to unprecedented rates of urbanisation. This inevitably leads to a surge in unregulated anthropogenic emissions that go on to form ozone and PM2.5. The majority of these sources are associated with energy production in residential, commercial, industrial, and transport sectors. Many rapidly developing cities lack the resources to maintain an extensive air quality monitoring network, so little is known of the sources, evolution, and chemical fate of these pollutants. This limits the ability to develop effective environmental policy to mitigate air pollution. Satellite observations provide daily coverage of the Earth’s atmosphere at relatively high spatial resolution (~25 km) and so offer a unique opportunity to circumvent the lack of ground-based air quality monitoring.

The successful PhD candidate will use satellite observations of air pollutants, interpreted with a chemical transport model, to constrain pollution sources and assess temporal and spatial variability of air pollution in and around cities. We propose a portfolio of target cities to cover a diverse mix of pollution sources. The first city to be studied is Birmingham (UK), as there are long-term ground-based observations and peer-reviewed publications to independently evaluate air pollution dynamics derived from satellite and model data. The methodology developed and validated for Birmingham will then be applied to cities where very limited surface observations suggest that air pollution routinely exceeds levels safe for public health. These include Delhi (India), Kathmandu (Nepal), Ontisha (Nigeria), São Paulo (Brazil), Jakarta (Indonesia), and Johannesburg-Pretoria (South Africa). These are selected to span a range of levels of urbanisation to demonstrate that methodology developed in this project will inform mitigation strategies irrespective of development stage.

PhD candidate specification:
University of Birmingham seeks a PhD student to conduct research beginning October 2017 that focuses on improving understanding of the sources of air pollution in rapidly urbanising cities. Skills development will include the use, analysis and interpretation of data from surface and space-based observations and the global GEOS-Chem chemical transport model.

The successful applicant should be proficient in written and spoken English and have a Masters degree (or equivalent qualification) in a field of Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science, or a related field. Experience with Linux and a computer programming language (R, Matlab, IDL, Fortran or similar) are an advantage, but not a requirement. The university offers beginner and advanced level Linux and computer programming workshops.

For more details on the scholarship, please visit our University webpage: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/postgraduate/pgr/global-challenges-scholarship.aspx