Workshop @ VizChitra 2025

Chitra-Lekha: Engaging with Environmental Storytelling through the Lens of Air Pollution Data

Schools taught us, “We cannot see air, only feel it.” But sadly now, we don’t just feel it deep inside our lungs but also see it with our red, itchy eyes. But there is more than what our irritable eye can see.

This session is about learning to see air using data from monitoring stations, modeling results, and satellites. Building a city’s pollution storyline using visual aids, without missing the scientific rigor.

Workshop Structure & Key Takeaways

1. A data stroll (~45 mins) : Participants would get to know different types of air quality data and open data sources available to start hands-on work.
2. Atmospheric Science 101: (~45 mins) Participants would understand the nuances of the data from an atmospheric science lens. This would help them better analyze data instead of making it a mere number-crunching exercise.
3. Narrate your city’s air pollution story: (~90 mins) This session will focus on the use of open data, like meteorological parameters and some satellite feeds to start building a storyline. Case study material will be provided in groups to explore and narrate.

Design of the Sessions

The sessions are designed to be highly interactive, featuring:

1. **A short quiz to engage participants and assess their understanding.
2. An interactive game specifically created to simplify technical jargon for participants without an atmospheric science background.
3. Case studies in the final session, using pre-curated datasets. Participants will collaborate in groups to explore these datasets, analyze examples, and create meaningful stories based on their findings.

Audience & Pre-requistes

The session would be useful for journalists, public policy analysts, researchers, and students. Prior experience working with Excel sheets and CSVs would be sufficient to start narrating a simple story. Data Viz apps like DataWrapper, Flourish, Tableau etc., can be add-ons, but they are not necessary. Participants who know can use Python (matplotlib, sklearn, bokeh, streamlit, pandas, geopandas, rasterio) and QGIS can leverage them to tell more nuanced stories. Nevertheless, we’ll focus on telling whatever story you can tell using the available data and science.

Participants are expected to carry their personal laptops with any data processing and visualisation software of their interest (Excel, Python, R, QGIS).

About the Instructors

The workshop will be handled by Dr. Sarath Guttikunda, Founder/Director of UrbanEmissions.info and Sai Krishna Dammalapati, Research Associate.

This session is part of the Workshop Day on 28th June, 2025 for VizChitra 2025