Daily Satellite Observations of Nitrogen Dioxide Air Pollution Inequality in New York City, New York and Newark, New Jersey: Evaluation and Application.

Urban air pollution disproportionately harms communities of color and low-income communities in the U.S. Intraurban nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) inequalities can be observed from space using the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). Past research has relied on time-averaged measurements, limiting our understanding of how neighborhood-level NO 2 inequalities co-vary with urban air quality and climate. Here, we use fine-scale (250 m × 250 m) airborne NO 2 remote sensing to demonstrate that daily TROPOMI observations resolve a major portion of census tract-scale NO 2 inequalities in the New York City-Newark urbanized area. Spatiotemporally coincident TROPOMI and airborne inequalities are well correlated ( r = 0.82-0.97), with slopes of 0.82-1.05 for relative and 0.76-0.96 for absolute inequalities for different groups. We calculate daily TROPOMI NO 2 inequalities over May 2018-September 2021, reporting disparities of 25-38% with race, ethnicity, and/or household income. Mean daily inequalities agree with results based on TROPOMI measurements oversampled to 0.01° × 0.01° to within associated uncertainties. Individual and mean daily TROPOMI NO 2 inequalities are largely insensitive to pixel size, at least when pixels are smaller than ∼60 km 2 , but are sensitive to low observational coverage. We statistically analyze daily NO 2 inequalities, presenting empirical evidence of the systematic overburdening of communities of color and low-income neighborhoods with polluting sources, regulatory ozone co-benefits, and worsened NO 2 inequalities and cumulative NO 2 and urban heat burdens with climate change.