Raising Environmental Alerts in the Arctic Region by Analyzing Pollution Data from Sentinel 5p

The paper presents the results of an analysis of a 3-year time series of pollution data from the European Satellite Sentinel 5p, with a focus on the identification of peaks of pollution in the Arctic region. This research contributes to the literature with a methodology for the automatic identification and geolocation of anomalous peaks of pollution, potentially indicating new or intensifying human activity, either industrial or commercial. A step increase in human activity could indicate new human settlements, growing ship traffic, or other forms of exploitation of the natural resources in the Arctic region, which, in turn, could be an indication of a growing environmental risk. While previous research mostly focuses on drawing accurate pollution maps, in our work we have designed an algorithm to identify peaks of pollution and, thus, eliminate pollution areas that do not represent an indication of a change in human activity, both on land and at sea. Our methodology has been tested in five areas of interest in the Arctic region. Results show how Sentinel 5p data can be effectively used for a large-scale, continuous monitoring of areas of interest, both on land and at sea. Our algorithm has identified roughly 200 peaks per year in the considered areas, highlighting the sources of pollution and indicating growing human activity in locations that are in fact generally considered at risk. Further work will be conducted in the ARCOS project to build a complete, longitudinal dataset of pollution peaks to be released as open data.