![]() We were especially surprised to find small, consistent pollution hotspots on many city blocks. We find that air pollution is surprisingly variable inside neighborhoods: concentrations can persistently vary by as much 5-8× within an individual city block. ![]() Our analyses suggest that concentration estimates for individual road segments are precise to within ± 10-20%. Our group then developed data analysis algorithms to convert this mobile monitoring dataset, perhaps the largest of its kind, into maps that represent consistent long-term trends of daytime, weekday air quality.īy using data from repeated measurements on each city block over an entire year, our data analysis approach produces stable estimates of the long-term daytime median concentration for each 30 meter segment of roadway that we sampled. Each city block was sampled on an average of 31 different days throughout the year. Here, we focused on three urban air pollutants - black carbon particles (BC), nitric oxide (NO) and NO2 (nitrogen dioxide). For over a year, the cars repeatedly mapped the streets of three Oakland neighborhoods during daytime hours. The cars visited different neighborhoods on different days, collecting more than 3 million data points and logging more than 15,000 miles. Aclima equipped these cars with their Environmental Intelligence sensing platform, which for this study incorporated research-grade fast-response gas and particle analyzers measuring at 1 second time resolution. We made repeated measurements of air pollution in Oakland, California using two specially equipped Google Street View cars. Selected as ES&T's "Top Environmental Technology Article of 2017." High resolution air pollution mapping with Google Street View cars: Exploiting big data. Therefore, despite the fact that air pollution can vary sharply in urban areas, our understanding of how pollution varies at the block-to-block scale is quite limited. This study demonstrates a new approach to filling this data gap by using specially equipped Google Street View cars to map urban air pollution every 30 meters, at 100,000× higher spatial resolution than possible with official monitors.Īrticle: Apte JS, Messier KP, Gani S, Brauer M, Kirchstetter TW, Lunden MM, Marshall JD, Portier CJ, Vermeulen RCH, Hamburg SP. In the US cities, there are generally 2-3 ambient monitoring sites for every million people. ![]() Most routine air pollution measurements in cities are collected at a small number of "ambient" monitoring sites that provide information on urban-background concentrations. The challenge: how does air quality vary within cities? ![]()
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