Sensor-Equipped Google Street View Cars Prove Adept at Sniffing Out "Hyperlocal" Pollution Sources

Researchers from the Universities of Utah and California at Riverside have experimented with tracking down "hyperlocal" sources of airborne pollution — by equipping Google Street View cars with sensors.

"With mobile vehicles, you can literally send them anywhere that they could drive to map out pollution, including sources that are off the road that previous monitoring missed," explains John Lin, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, of the project. "I think the roving sentinel idea would be quite doable for a lot of cities."

The core concept behind the project is simple: fixed-position monitoring systems can provide an overview of air quality, but only across a relatively wide area. By equipping vehicles with the same technology, it's possible gather data over a much wider area and model the result to find the sources of pollution — even when the occur off-road.

The team launched trials in 2019, partnering with Google to add air quality sensors to a pair of Street View cars — vehicles which were always on the road and visited a broad area as they took imagery for the company's mapping service. The data thus gathered showed expected spikes in pollutant levels along highways, while a new atmospheric modeling method proposed by Lin confirmed pollution from two known sources — as well as a previously-unknown source, in an industrial area near Salt Lake City airport.

"The big takeaway is that there is a lot of spatial variability of air pollution from one end of a block to another," notes Tammy Thompson, co-author of the study and a senior air quality scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). "There can be big differences in what people are breathing, and that scale is not captured by the typical regulatory monitors and the policy that the US EPA uses to control air pollution."

"We need to be able to understand what average air pollution looks like in different communities," Thompson continues, "and then understand why there is variability and why there are hotspots, and therefore what we can do about it. It’s really, really important as we learn more and more about inequity in air pollution and what we're breathing across the country."

The team's work has been published in the journal Atmospheric Environment under open-access terms; data is available to download from Zenodo.org.

Main article image courtesy of Logan Mitchell/University of Utah.