Disseminating Scientific Results in the Age of Rapid Communication

The COVID-19 related lockdown measures spawned a host of press releases and news articles in the mainstream media on the connections between reduced human activity and improved air quality. In tandem, preprints of COVID-19 and air quality studies and articles based on the preprints began appearing in the social media (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn). The COVID-19 lockdown measures offered a rare opportunity for air quality researchers to showcase their measurements and models. As the virus spread from China to other parts of the world, various countries started imposing lockdown measures one by one. This was soon followed by reports of improved air quality, as observed by satellites, that started to flood the social media outlets. Figure 1 shows the number of articles with the words “COVID-19 and PM2.5”, “COVID-19 and air quality”, “COVID-19 and NO2” found on each of the social media outlets as of August 13, 2020 when the search was made. TROPOMI is the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument on the Copernicus Sentinel 5 Precursor (S5P) satellite launched (October 13, 2017) and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).