Spaceborne Nitrogen Dioxide Observations from the Sentinel-5P TROPOMI over Turkey ^†

With rapid population growth, both urbanization and transportation affect air pollution, population health, and global warming. A number of air pollutants are released from industrial facilities and other activities and may cause adverse effects on human health and the environment. One of the biggest air pollutants, nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), is mainly caused by the combustion of fossil fuels, especially from traffic exhaust gases. Over the years, air pollution has been monitored using satellite remote sensing data. In this study, we investigate the relationship of the tropospheric NO₂ retrieved from the recently launched Sentinel-5 Precursor, a low-earth-orbit atmosphere mission dedicated to monitoring air pollution equipped with the spectrometer Tropomoi (Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument), and the population density over Turkey. For this purpose, we use the mean value of the NO₂ collected from July 2018 to January 2019 and the statistic population data from 2017. The results showed a significant correlation of higher than 0.72 between the population density and the maximum NO₂ values. For future studies, we recommend investigating the correlation of different air pollutants with population and other factors contributing to air and environmental pollution.