Long-term Association between NO2and Human Mobility: A Two-year Spatiotemporal Study during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Southeast Asia

Abstract

AbstractSince the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have implemented lockdowns and movement restrictions to contain the disease outbreak. Previous studies have reported a significant positive correlation between NO2and mobility level during the lockdowns in early 2020. Though NO2level and mobility exhibited similar spatial distribution, our initial exploration indicated that the decreased mobility level did not always result in concurrent decreasing NO2level during a two-year time period in Southeast Asia with human movement data at a very high spatial resolution (i.e., Facebook origin-destination data). It indicated that factors other than mobility level contributed to NO2level decline. Our subsequent analysis used a trained Multi-Layer Perceptron model to assess mobility and other contributing factors (e.g., travel modes, temperature, wind speed) and predicted future NO2levels in Southeast Asia. The model results suggest that, while as expected mobility has a strong impact on NO2level, a more accurate prediction requires considering different travel modes (i.e., driving and walking). Mobility shows two-sided impacts on NO2level: mobility above the average level has a high impact on NO2, whereas mobility at a relatively low level shows negligible impact. The results also suggest that spatio-temporal heterogeneity and temperature also have impacts on NO2and they should be incorporated to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the association between NO2and mobility in the future study.