DatAC: A visual analytics platform to explore climate and air quality indicators associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused an unprecedented global health crisis, with several countries imposing lockdowns to control the coronavirus spread. Important research efforts are focused on evaluating the association of environmental factors with the survival and spread of the virus and different works have been published, with contradictory results in some cases. Data with spatial and temporal information is a key factor to get reliable results and, although there are some data repositories for monitoring the disease both globally and locally, an application that integrates and aggregates data from meteorological and air quality variables with COVID-19 information has not been described so far to the best of our knowledge. Here, we present DatAC (Data Against COVID-19), a data fusion project with an interactive web front end that integrates COVID-19 and environmental data in Spain. DatAC is provided with powerful data analysis and statistical capabilities that allow users to explore and analyze individual trends and associations among the provided data. Using the application, we have evaluated the impact of the Spanish lockdown on the air quality, observing that NO2, CO, PM2.5, PM10 and SO2 levels decreased drastically in the entire territory, while O-3 levels increased. We observed similar trends in urban and rural areas, although the impact has been more important in the former. Moreover, the application allowed us to analyze correlations among climate factors, such as ambient temperature, and the incidence of COVID-19 in Spain. Our results indicate that temperature is not the driving factor and without effective control actions, outbreaks will appear and warm weather will not substantially limit the growth of the pandemic. DatAC is available at https://covid19.genyo.es. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study investigates the association between COVID-19 and environmental factors, presenting the DatAC project which integrates COVID-19 and environmental data in Spain. The research shows that the lockdown measures in Spain have positively impacted air quality, but temperature is not the main driving factor.