Air Quality

About pollution,particle matters, PM2.5, Beijing vs. Shanghai and other cities - Part 2

In this second part we are going to compare pollutions levels (pm2.5) between the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Paris. We reused the data extracted in the previous post and we build simple visualisation to compare for each day, which city is the worse. Surprisingly (for french), Paris is not always the bet to live and there are some days, pollution is worse there than Shanghai or Beijing. Overall Process : Get data : from US embassy PM2.

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Web-scraping of weather data with rvest package

We have a project aiming at Air Quality Predictions (see other posts on the same topic) from past air quality data and weather conditions. In a previous post we have downloaded air quality data for Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenyang and Paris. In this post we will get the associated weather data using web scrapping. There are several options for weather report website providing historical hourly data for weather station :

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GDP Growth and Chinese new year fireworks

Winter 2016 - For the first time ever, the city of Shanghai (and probably of Nanjing) entered the year of the monkey with a very quiet night. For safety and environmental reasons, the usual fireworks and firecrackers hysteria was forbidden downtown by the local government. (read the full story This is a very big cultural change which was implemented very strictly. Fireworks and other noisy traditional firecrackers are used for important events in China, such as weddings, opening of shops or companies and lunar new year celebrations.

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About pollution,particle matters, PM2.5, Beijing vs. Shanghai and other cities - Part 1

Pollution in Beijing (and even Shanghai) at the end of 2015 reached terrible levels, there have been a lot of comments in the Chinese and international news about air pollution in China. AQI (air quality index) and PM2.5 (particle matters 2.5 micro gram per cubic meter) are the most popular data used to measure pollution in China which is mainly related to fine particles in the air. We will study in this series of posts the pollution in Beijing, compare it to previous years and to other cities such as Guangzhou and Shanghai, Paris.

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