Weekly county-level pollution data for China from Zhang, Carleton, Lin, and Zhou (accepted, Nature Sustainability), "Estimating the role of air quality improvements in the decline of suicide rates in China"

This dataset contains weekly, county-level air pollution data for 2,839 counties from 2013 to early 2018. These data are used and described in Zhang, Carleton, Lin, and Zhou (accepted, Nature Sustainability), "Estimating the role of air quality improvements in the decline of suicide rates in China". When the paper is published a link to the manuscript will be added here. The manuscript Methods section details data construction. In summary, these county-level observations are obtained from monitoring stations maintained by the China National Environmental Monitoring Center (CNEMC), which is affiliated with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of China. CNEMC began publishing hourly air pollution data in 2013, including the Air Quality Index, PM2.5, PM10, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide. We average hourly data to the station-day level and use inverse-distance weighting with a radius of 200km to convert data from station to the county level. We average across days to generate county-level weekly values. Any missing station-hour observations in the raw data are omitted in this spatial and temporal aggregation. Our main analysis relies on PM2.5, but all pollutants are released here.