Impact of pollution if you live on upper floor of a high rise building

Introduction

Laymen explanation

In a city how does the air pollution change as a function of the height?

How much less air pollution is expected at the higher level, e.g. At 100m height (for example, 30th floor) as opposed to zero level, assuming that source of air pollution is urban traffic (created at 0 height). Some may feel that they can escape pollution if live in higher floor. This article tries to answer it scientifically.

Technical explanation

According to the experts, you'd have to be 3,000 meters up before you'd see a noticeable reduction in air pollution.How high is that?

Tallest towers in the world

And 3000 meters is

That suggests there's no way we're going to escape pollution by living high up.

Now, they do say there is an exception: inversions. Inversions are when cold air piles on top of warm air, trapping that warm air (and pollution) near the ground. Here's what that looks like:

According to the article, you can escape inversions at 150-300 meters up. 150 meters is a lot more modest than 3,000, but it's still pretty high. You'd need to be at least 45 stories high (converting meters to stories), which is pretty darn high, but not impossible. Unfortunately, most pollution (at least that I've seen in China) does not have strong inversions.

2. A Researcher has real world data from the 20th floor of an apartment in Beijing. Twenty floors is a more realistic floor height to test this question.

In his words:

I have lots of data because I've been doing open-source air purifier tests. In those tests, I used a laser particle counter to take baseline particulate levels (before turning on any purifier) in a regular apartment.

Now, ideally I'd have data comparing different floors in the building. But I wasn't trying to test this question, so I don't have that. However, my data can answer a rougher question: does being on the 20th floor put you above Beijing's pollution?

Here is 250 days of particulate pollution data from that apartment. The red line is approximately the World Health Organization's 24-hour PM 2.5 limit.

Conclusion

Thus, living on the 20th floor by no means guarantees clean air. Air pollution can reach up at least 20 floors.

Now, this data cannot rule out a small effect. Is air on the 20th floor slightly better than air on the 3rd floor? This data cannot answer that question. But it can tell us that living on the 20th floor in a polluted city is still hazardous.

Reference

https://www.quora.com/Can-we-escape-air-pollution-by-living-in-a-tall-building

https://www.quora.com/In-a-city-how-the-air-pollution-changes-decreases-as-a-function-of-the-height

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