Google Street View Cars Map Air Quality

Google is using its Street View to map urban air quality.

In partnership with San Francisco-based Aclima, Google Earth Outreach strapped environmental sensors onto its roaming vehicles in order to measure various air pollutants.

Three Google Street View cars clocked 750 hours of drive time and gathered 150 million data points—gauging nitrogen dioxide, nitric oxide, ozone, carbon monoxide, methane, black carbon, particulate matter, and Volatile Organic Compounds.

The month-long test in Denver was conducted alongside the DISCOVER-AQ campaign by NASA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The latter coordinated with Google to provide scientific expertise and instrument operations as part of an agreement with Aclima.



"We have a profound opportunity to understand how cities live and breathe in an entirely new way," Aclima CEO Davida Herzl said in a statement. "With more than half of the world's population now living in cities, environmental health is becoming increasingly important to quality of life."

Until now, the EPA has traditionally relied on equipment stationed around urban areas to assess whether air quality meets or exceeds health standards. While designed for air quality regulation, the monitoring network does not illustrate air pollution as it relates to the general public.

"Environmental air quality is an issue that affects everyone, especially those living in big cities," said Karin Tuxen-Bettman, program director for Google Earth Outreach. "This partnership with Aclima enables us to take the next steps in our pilot project to utilize Street View's existing infrastructure and test Google Maps as an environmental sensing platform for mapping the environment."




This fall, Google and Aclima will expand their mapping efforts to the San Francisco Bay area. Eventually, the mobile sensing platform will roll out to many more communities where Google Street View vehicles drive.

"There's unlimited potential for our work to help improve the health and resilience of communities everywhere," Herzl said.



Aclima and Google previously partnered to map indoor environments. Together they created a unique network that connects 21 Google offices around the world, and processes 500 million data points daily, including comfort measures of temperature, humidity, noise, and light, and air pollutants like carbon dioxide and particulate matter.