Weekly Viz 2023-09-25

Bay Area Air Quality 2018-2023

Last week, due to some wildfire in Oregon, the air quality in the Bay Area became pretty poor and the sky looked smoky. This unfortunately isn’t the first time – people here sadly have gone through this multiple times in the past 5 years, especially in the Summer and Autumn seasons. This week, the data I picked to visualize is the monthly AQI in the Bay Area since 2018. I am curious about what months generally have the best air quality and how is the AQI trending.

My Visualization

The visualization is a color-coded table (made with gantt bars in Tableau) of the monthly highest hourly AQI in three locations I picked in the Bay Area – from north to the south, San Francisco, Redwood City, and San Jose.

Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

Dashboard link

Insights

• Generally speaking, Spring has the best air quality in the bay area, while the second half of the year tends to have worse air quality, with extreme AQIs during the wildfire times;
• Of the three locations I picked, Redwood City has the most greens (Good monthly AQI). San Francisco seems to have better air quality in the summer (maybe because it is always windy in the summer…). San Jose overall has the poorest air quality among the three;
• In the beginning of this year, we actually observed a relatively good air quality level compared to the past 5 years; However, the recent wildfire made the September numbers look pretty bad.

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