Change in AQI
The map above is a choropleth of the United States with each of its counties colored by its change in AQI. If there is no data for the county, the color is white. The change in AQI is simply the AQI from 2010 subtracted from the AQI in 2018. If the county is colored green, the AQI from 2010 to 2018 improved, meaning the number went down. If the county is colored red, the AQI worsened as the years went on, meaning the number went up. When you hover over a county, an area chart pops up showing the AQI of that county for each year.
What I found interesting here, was that for states like Hawaii where we generally think that the air is fresh, although its AQI improved, we see that in 2010 it had an AQI of about 200 and only went down to about 150 by 2018. Which if you look at the table on my home page or if you scroll down to my next visualization, an AQI of 150 is considered unhealthy air.
The map was created by taking what I learned from previous homeowrk assignments and applying it here. The original credit to the choropleth map can be found here. The original credit for the area chart can be found here.
AQI
The map above is a choropleth of the United States with each of its counties colored by its AQI for each year. If there is no data for the county, it is colored white. If the county is colored green, the air quality conditions for that year is considered Good. If the county is colored red, the air quality conditions for that year is considered Unhealthy. These classifications were taken from the EPA website. To interact with this map, use the scroll bar to select a year and see the choropleth change colors.
When looking at the first visualization, one might assume that counties with AQIs that have worsened over the years would have unhealthy air quality conditions. But from this map, we can see that most counties actually have fairly good AQIs. This map also supports the stigma of Southern California having a lot of air pollution and smog which contributes to their unhealthy AQI score.
The slider was created with help from W3Schools.