Air Quality in Beijing: Calendar Heatmaps 2014-2022

This project attempts to use sky colors as a color scheme that gives a more intuitive representation of air quality in the city. Although air quality index is not the single factor determining sky colors and vice versa, it is related to visibility and rises in extreme weather. Increase in the indensity of Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5) almost always comes with smoggy weather, while dust storms often contribute to the concentration of Particulate Matter (PM10).

Thus, this project proposes a more intuitive color pattern for visualizing air quality indices in Beijing: blue and azure for low PM2.5 and PM10 data, white-ish for high PM2.5 and lower PM10, and sand/orange-ish color for high PM2.5 and higher PM10 datapoints. Eventually, this project would give an approximiate (and definitely not precise) representation of "what might the sky color look like" in a given day in 2014-2022 Beijing.

Source: Beijing Environmental Protection Monitoring Center (https://aqicn.org/city/beijing/). The daily AQI is based on the 24 hours average of hourly readings.

Note: In this heatmap we use PM2.5 AQI plus PM10 AQI to represent air quality in Beijing.