Challenge / Goal
Air pollution has been named as “the biggest environmental risk” to public health according to European Court of Auditors. In Europe, air pollution kills around 400,000 each year. However, current maps of urban air pollution, which are the output of data assimilation, statistics, modeling and simulations, do not provide accurate or actionable data of vital importance for the air that most people breathe. Those maps are often based on a single measure, then extrapolated across the city and are little more than educated guesses.The variability of air pollution with more than 8x within the space of 200 meters is not reflected on current air pollution maps. AirVeraCity provides an easy access to actionable high-resolution air quality data. This data can be used by the community and decision makers to make relevant decisions in both short and long term.
Solution
How to maintain accuracy is the main challenge in deploying air pollution sensors to mobile platforms because of mobility-caused distortions on slow responding chemical sensor measurements and sensor calibration. To address mobility-caused distortions, extensive wind tunnel and field tested techniques were implemented under various environmental conditions as were a number of signal processing techniques for recovering underlying pollutant concentrations. In terms of calibration, a scientifically studied rendezvous calibration process was developed. This mitigated mobility-caused distortions and recalibrated the mobile sensors when in close vicinity with reference stations.
Functionality
Monitoring hyper-local air pollution
Want to learn more about the lessons learned, financial details and results?
Log in