AAAR 35th Annual Conference October 17 - October 21, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Application of Google Street View Cars for Air Pollution Measurements at Community, Urban, and Regional Scales: Denver CO
PAUL A. SOLOMON, Surender Kaushik, Andrew Whitehill, Ashok K. Singh, Melissa M. Lunden, Nick Staubach, Alexandra Teste, Davida Herzl, U.S. EPA, Office of Reserach and Development, Las Vegas, NV
Abstract Number: 206 Working Group: Urban Aerosols
Abstract Stationary National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) require measurement of key pollutants on a community scale, but measurement sites are sparsely located in urban areas where pollutants can vary greatly on small spatial scales. Understanding variability of pollutants on small spatial scales is important for exposure assessment, air quality model evaluation, and empowering individuals to reduce health risks from air pollution. Deployment of air pollution monitors on mobile platforms greatly improves air quality information on the spatial resolution of air pollutants compared with resolution provided by routine, stationary air monitoring sites. In the current study, three Google Street View cars were instrumented with a suite of high-quality reference-grade equipment to measure pollutants of interest, such as O3, NO, NO2, CO2, black carbon, and particulate matter. Supplemental measurements that included temperature (T), relative humidity (RH), wind speed (WS), and wind direction (WD) were also included. These three instrumented automobiles were driven concurrently in a variety of spatiotemporal patterns in Denver, Colorado over 22 days from mid-July to mid-August 2014, including dense driving around stationary air monitoring and the Denver near-roadway sites as well as regionally. Routes were designed to make use of simultaneous sampling from three mobile platforms, including interconnected and overlapping patterns. This presentation will describe (1) performance characteristics of the air pollution monitors as employed in three mobile platforms relative to each car and to the NAAQS stationary sites and (2) spatial representativeness of central sites and variation of pollutants across a range of spatial scales and temporal dimensions.