North Texas will soon host its first match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, kicking off a month-long event expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to the region.
That means more flights, more cars, more buses and more folks moving through one of the largest metros in the U.S.
Most of the fans will be focused on what’s happening on the field. Some scientists will be paying close attention to something else — something in the air.
Yunyao Li is assistant professor and director of the atmospheric intelligence and Modeling Lab at UT Arlington. She joins the Standard to discuss her research. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: This is a rare opportunity of sorts for someone who studies the atmosphere such as yourself. What can the World Cup tell us about air quality that you couldn’t learn from any ordinary day in North Texas?
Yunyao Li: Dallas Fort-Worth is a very large and a fast-growing region. Previous studies shows that the traffic is now the major source of air pollution here.
We will have more visitors, more cars, more flights, and we can observe how the environment responds to this short period of intense human activity here.
Well, paint a picture for listeners who don’t know what’s involved here. How do you plan to measure any changes in air quality?
Okay, so we place sensors near the AT&T Stadium because that is where large-crowd, events-related traffic will concentrate. We also have sensors near DFW airport to capture the influence of increased flight and airport-related traffic.
Also, we will use the TCEQ [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] monitoring data across Dallas and Fort Worth to understand the broader region pictures, not just one location.
Now you have factors like ozone, you have temperature obviously, humidity… What do you consider to be the most important, from a public health standpoint?
The weather also can affect the air-pollution levels. Also, the chemical species also affects the reactions of this air pollution. So all of these variables are very important.
Now, what do you expect to see? I suspect you have a working hypothesis here?
We expect a long linear relationship between the emission and pollutions.
So based on our previous study — so we analyzed the data from 2022 to 2024 — we found that during the weekdays, the nitrogen dioxide level is higher. This is very reasonable because we have more traffic during weekdays.
However, the pollution like ozone, their level during the weekend are higher than the weekdays, so you see this long linear relationship.
Well, the World Cup lasts only a few weeks, but as you sort of referenced earlier, North Texas is adding more people faster than most other parts of the country. I’m curious how much of this is really about understanding the consequences of rapid growth, not so much a surge of people?
We see the DFW population increase and also city expansions. That’s why we plan to deploy more monitors in this region to help us to understand the air quality here. Also we will combine the ground-based monitors with NASA Nova satellite observations.
The NASA Nova, they have satellite observation covering more years, so we can see the trend, we can see that possible impact of the increase of human activity and traffic here to the air pollution.
Also, the satellite observation have a better coverage. You know that DFW is very large. Even though we have a lot of monitors, there is still space gap between these monitors. However, the satellite data can give us a better special coverage.
What would this mean for, say, a policymaker or someone trying to come up with what the Dallas-Fort Worth area can do to reduce pollution?
First, we need to understand what are the sources of the pollution and what the composition of the pollution is.
Different sources have different chemical footprints and different health impacts. If we know the source, we can have different strategies to reduce the emissions.
If we know what is the major source, we know the source of the pollution pattern, the emissions, we can have different strategies to reduce the pollution level while not stopping the development.
We want to have both development and clean air.
