The Effect of Climate Change and Air Pollution on Public Health

Abstract

The effects of temperature and air pollution on public health are comprehensive and ubiquitous. Therefore, this dissertation deals with the comprehensive topic of climate change and air pollution and their effects on public health. The first chapter examines the effect of temperature on mortality in 148 cities in the U.S. from 1973 through 2006. We focused on the timing of exposure to unseasonal temperature and temporal and spatial acclimation. The second chapter incorporated AOD data from satellite imagery with other predictors such as meteorological variables, land use regression, and spatial smoothing to predict the daily concentration of PM2.5 at a 1 km2 resolution across the southeastern United States, covering the seven states of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Florida for the years from 2003 through 2011. As the sequel of the result from the second chapter, the last chapter investigated the acute effect of PM2.5 on mortality in the entire population of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia between 2007 and 2011 using the predictions from the second topic as PM2.5 exposure.