A PROGRAM OF COMPREHENSIVE URBAN POLLUTION RESEARCH CORRELATING SPACE IMAGERY AND GROUND DATA

Using the city of Irkutsk, East Siberia, Russia as an example, the authors outline a program for assessing the health effects of urban pollution. More specifically, the purpose of the research was to establish a correlation between the distribution of overall pollution, determined from remote sensing data, and the health of the population, determined from ground-based investigation of various indicators of public health in different sectors of the city. A “pollution/sickness” regression coefficient is calculated that shows by how much the incidence of disease increased in various areas of the city as a result of an increase in pollution of a given magnitude. Translated by Edward Torrey, Alexandria, Virginia, from: Geografiya i prirodnyye resursy, 1999, No. 1, pp. 115-122.