High-Resolution Air Pollution Mapping with Google Street View Cars: Exploiting Big Data.
By J. Apte, K. Messier, Shahzad Gani, M. Brauer, Thomas W. Kirchstetter, M. Lunden, Julian D. Marshall, Chris Portier, R. Vermeulen, S. Hamburg. Environmental Science and Technology, 2017
680 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Air pollution affects billions of people worldwide, yet ambient pollution measurements are limited for much of the world. Urban air pollution concentrations vary sharply over short distances (≪1 km) owing to unevenly distributed emission sources, dilution, and physicochemical transformations. Accordingly, even where present, conventional fixed-site pollution monitoring methods lack the spatial resolution needed to characterize heterogeneous human exposures and localized pollution hotspots. Here, we demonstrate a measurement approach to reveal urban air pollution patterns at 4-5 orders of magnitude greater spatial precision than possible with current central-site ambient monitoring. We equipped Google Street View vehicles with a fast-response pollution measurement platform and repeatedly sampled every street in a 30-km2 area of Oakland, CA, developing the largest urban air quality data set of its type. Resulting maps of annual daytime NO, NO2, and black carbon at 30 m-scale reveal stable, persistent pollution patterns with surprisingly sharp small-scale variability attributable to local sources, up to 5-8× within individual city blocks. Since local variation in air quality profoundly impacts public health and environmental equity, our results have important implications for how air pollution is measured and managed. If validated elsewhere, this readily scalable measurement approach could address major air quality data gaps worldwide.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c72fd716e65ca09ab6b656c5ffa709b783dea39
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Environmental Engineering
In Global and Planetary Change
In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Citations in the corpus
- Ten questions concerning the built environment and mental health (2019, background): “This methodology is strengthened through the use of sizeable cohorts, but suffers from faulty assumptions that indoor/outdoor concentrations are always correlated [90,91] and air pollution from one source in an area adequately represents air pollution within the entire study boundary [92].”
- City Scanner: Building and Scheduling a Mobile Sensing Platform for Smart City Services (2018, methodology): “As in [1], the technique of bootstrapping is used to gain an understanding of how reliable the mean and median values are for each segment.”