SAN FRANCISCO, CA, June 05, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Google Earth Outreach, Aclima, the Environmental Defense Fund ( EDF), and engineering researchers at The University of Texas at Austin ( UT Austin) published results of a year-long mobile mapping campaign to measure hyperlocal air pollution in Oakland, CA. This breakthrough research is featured in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Science & Technology, and is the first set of findings from Google and Aclima about street-level air quality in California communities.
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High-Resolution Air Pollution Mapping with Google Street View Cars: Exploiting Big Data shows that air pollution is hyperlocal, varying block by-block across urban airsheds. Two Google Street View (SV) vehicles equipped with Aclima’s mobile sensing platform measured black carbon particles (BC), nitrogen oxide, and nitrogen dioxide between May 2015 and May 2016, collecting 2.7 million data points over 14,000 miles and 150 days.
This is one of the largest data sets of urban air pollution ever assembled. The study demonstrates the value of Aclima’s highly scalable approach to cost-effective, high-resolution air quality measurement to identify local pollution hotspots and better understand impacts on human health and the environment. In the coming months, Aclima and Google plan to release more maps and insights from Los Angeles, the Central Valley, and San Francisco Bay Area conducted in 2016.
“At a time when millions of people are living in cities with poor air quality, mapping street-level pollution, block-by-block in real-time, provides an unprecedented tool for improving human and planetary health,” said Melissa Lunden, Chief Scientist at Aclima. “We’re incredibly proud of this work with Google, EDF, and UT Austin to advance a deeper understanding of hyperlocal urban air pollution. The Aclima sensing platform is a scalable solution to address major air quality monitoring gaps worldwide.”
“Air pollution is largely an invisible threat, one that poses especially devastating risks in lower-income areas like West Oakland,” said Steven Hamburg, EDF Chief Scientist. “This new method allows us to visualize the data so communities and policymakers can identify the sources of harmful pollution and take action to improve safety and health.”
“Google likes big challenges,” said Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Program Manager for Google Earth Outreach and lead for the air quality project at Google, “the mapping of air pollution, raising awareness of the problem, and enabling action to solve it – that’s a big challenge and we’re excited to play a part in it.”
“The new mobile technology allows us to measure pollution levels block-by-block where people actually breathe the air – at street level,” said Joshua Apte, lead author of the study and assistant professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. “Combined with data from stationary monitors, this new technique will help policymakers and the public understand where people are at greatest risk of breathing unhealthy air, enabling them to make smarter choices about how to limit pollution.”
What We Found
According to the World Health Organization, 92% of people worldwide breathe unhealthy air, yet ambient pollution measurements are limited. Even when available, ambient monitoring does not provide information on the hyperlocality of pollution concentrations. This study reports on Aclima’s scalable new measurement technique for mapping air pollution at as much as 100,000 times greater spatial resolution than is possible with current regulatory monitors. Our measurements reveal that urban air pollution is surprisingly more variable than previously appreciated, with air quality changing over the course of a city block. Conventional fixed-site measurements provide regional snapshots of air quality, but local variation is known to profoundly impact public health and environmental equity.
How We Did It
Researchers at UT Austin, EDF, and Aclima designed the daily driving plan for cars to ensure that each neighborhood was systematically sampled at different times of the day, week, and year. The cars repeatedly measured pollution on every street and highway within a 30 square kilometer area of Oakland. Cars drove in the flow of traffic at normal speeds. Over the course of a year, the team sampled each road in this area an average of 30 times.
The Aclima platform in the cars integrates sensing hardware, data management and computation, quality control, and visualization functions, facilitating extensive, routine measurements. The system continuously streams data to Aclima’s cloud-based data processing and storage system where data is aggregated and analyzed. In addition to air quality measurement, the mobile platform digitizes and prepares each air-sample for geospatial visualization through an on-board data management system. An extensive network management system enables scientists and engineers at UT Austin and Aclima to monitor conditions in real-time.
