| dc.description.abstract | Air pollution has significant impacts on the environment and human health. Recent studies have been focusing on analyzing the separate impacts of each air pollutants to effectively mitigate the potential air pollution related health risks. Fine particles, with diameter less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5), are one of the pollutants attract a lot of interest in current researches. The PM2.5 particles are very small in size, therefore they remain suspended in the air and easily gets into human body through inhalation, and consequently cause respiratory diseases to humans. To understand the importance of PM2.5 to human health, many ground stations have been established in some regions to measure PM2.5 concentration. However, existing sparse in situ systems may limit their capability to observe detailed PM2.5 concentration and distribution at regional scale. Hence, using NASA’s spaceborne MODIS data, which has the advantages of a wide coverage and high spatial resolution, is seen as one of the optimal choices to derive PM2.5 concentration. In this study, PM2.5 is estimated based on its relationship with the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), the Level-2 product derived from space-borne MODIS observation. The correlation between the MODIS-estimated PM2.5 and the statistical allergic rhinitis patients from various cities in Taiwan was analysed by using statistical methods. Our preliminary result suggests a relationship between MODIS AOD and ground-based PM2.5 with a correlation coefficient of about 0.692. This model could explain up to 78.3% training samples within one standard deviation margin. This research also pointed out the positive impacts of PM2.5 to allergic rhinitis patient in adults (aged 18-65) and preschoolers/teenagers (aged 3-18) groups and as well as the significant positive correlation particular in both spring and fall. The key finding is that satellite observations and data may provide valuable information to imply the potential risk regions. The addressing of the health risk region could be useful for affected people to find their way to protect themselves from the unexpected impacts from air pollutants. In future, the additional environmental factors, which might be other causes of respiratory diseases, will be considered for better assessment. | en_US |