Mapping the way to cleaner air
By Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach, and Lead for Project Air View
Today marks the first annual UN International Day of Clean Air for blue skies, we hope London’s story inspires many other cities to take action to reduce air pollution.
Maps can be a powerful storytelling tool, especially when you want to make complex data easy to understand. While people often use them to navigate the world around them, from getting to a local business to avoiding a traffic jam, the Google Earth team has increasingly been using maps to make the invisible visible, visualizing air quality in cities worldwide.
For the first time, people can now interact with air pollution data on a 3D map of London in a new Google Earth story, authored by Environmental Defense Fund Europe. In partnership with EDF and the Mayor of London on Breathe London, a project to give fresh insight into London’s air quality, we drove Street View cars equipped with special pollution sensors through London’s streets and cobblestone roads, taking street-by-street air quality measurements for an entire year.
The result is a street-level map of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a gas which is harmful to human health and produced by transit, heating, and power generation. In addition to learning about the public health effects of air pollution and its sources, people can use the tour to zoom in on particular streets to get a closer look at how pollution levels change within a city block, or how air quality rises and falls over a typical day. City officials and planners can use this hyper-local data to focus their efforts and people can now see a new picture of air quality in their neighborhood that was hidden to them before.
Mapping the way to cleaner air
As part of Project Air View, our effort to measure, model, and map air pollution using specially equipped Street View cars, we criss-crossed London for a full year, taking air quality readings each second we drove. After collecting 8.5 million measurements for NO2, fine particulate matter (PM2.5), ozone, and other pollutants, EDF and our Breathe London partners created a high-resolution map of London’s air quality.
Expanding Air View to more cities around the planet
It’s alarming that more than 90 percent of the world breathes polluted air. Working with partners around the world, Project Air View has made more than 500 million air measurements to help cities accelerate actions to curb pollution so that we can all breathe better and live healthier.
We have been working with cities across the U.S. and Europe for a few years now, such as London, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam, sharing air quality insights on our Environmental Insights Explorer to give cities data and insights to help accelerate climate action. As we expand our Project Air View efforts worldwide, our hope is that more cities, communities and individuals can use environmental data to develop tailored solutions that clean the air.
