PhD Candidate SUNY ESF Syracuse, New York, United States
The first case of a new, severe coronavirus (COVID-19) was confirmed in the United States on January 21st, 2020. After this confirmation, many United States governors implemented executive orders to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Due to these government-backed shutdowns, many reports have shown that the air quality in major cities around the world has improved. New York was one of the states where an executive order restricting mobility was enacted; this state contains New York City (NYC), which is the most populous city in the United States. There has been limited work on if this trend in air quality improvements was experienced in the United States, specifically in the densely populated NYC metropolitan area. Thus, the focus of this study was to examine changes in NYC’s air quality during the first five months of 2020 and if those changes could be attributed to the COVID-19-associated shutdowns. Daily concentrations of particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) were obtained from 15 central monitoring stations throughout the five NYC boroughs for the first five months (January through May) of 2015-2020. Similar to recent reports in other major cities, decreases of 36% in PM2.5 and 51% in NO2 were observed shortly after the shutdown began in 2020. Using a linear time lag model to compare these changes in 2020 to pollutant concentrations in the previous five years (2015-2019), no significant differences between years were found. This finding shows the importance of considering temporal variability and long-term trends of air pollutant concentrations when analyzing for short-term differences in air quality related to the COVID-19 shutdowns.
