Here’s how many pollution-related deaths your state is exporting or importing
Air doesn't stay contained within state lines (JuniperPhoton/)Air pollution kills between 90,000 to 360,000 people in the U.S. every year. And the two pollutants public health officials are most concerned about—ozone and fine particulate matter—are responsible for 90 percent of air pollution-related deaths.The Nature study might be first to attribute how much air pollution is crossing state lines. Dedoussi says such an analysis hadn’t been performed until now because following the footprints of particles in the atmosphere back to their source requires serious computing power. Now, atmospheric scientists are finally able to do so. As Steven Barrett, a coauthor of the study and an aerospace engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts it, “the basic idea is do a simulation of what’s happening in the atmosphere, but backwards.”The team used EPA emissions data for the years 2005, 2011, and 2018 and a computer model that simulates wind patterns and...