Meaning from Monitoring
Real-time information about air quality is proliferating, including in communities next to oil refineries in the San Francisco Bay area. We want to help those communities use the information to make structural change, including reducing their exposures to air pollution.
We created airwatchbayarea.org to make current and historical data accessible and explorable. Read our report.
We are bringing the Smell My City app to the Bay area, with the help of CMU's CREATE Lab. This enables residents to annotate monitoring data with their own observations of pollution.
We used personal health monitors to see if health data could be correlated to air quality data. Read our report.
We analyzed two years’ worth of fenceline and community monitoring data from Richmond, California, to learn about air quality and the quality of monitoring information. Read the executive summary or our full report.
We developed the Toxic Soup Index, a novel way of representing community exposures to multiple pollutants. Learn more.
We continue to look for meaningful ways to synthesize monitoring data so that it better represents what people living next to oil refineries go through on a daily basis. We call this process “epistemic innovation.” Learn more.
Sufyan Abbasi ∘ Amos Akinola ∘ Constance Beutel ∘ Kelsey Boone ∘ John Bowman ∘ Janet Callaghan ∘ Paul Dille ∘ Beatrice Dias ∘ Amy Gottsegen ∘ Jay Gunkelman ∘ Cheryl Holzmeyer ∘ Yen-Chia Hsu ∘ Kathy Kerridge ∘ Denny Larson ∘ Niklas Lollo ∘ Jesse Marquez ∘ Sean McMillon ∘ Gwen Ottinger ∘ Derek Parrott ∘ Janet Pygeorge ∘ Nancy Rieser ∘ Matt Salvetti ∘ Randy Sargent
Dawn Naufus provided technical support. Crockett-Rodeo United to Defend the Environment helped organize the real-time health study. Funding for various aspects of the project was provided by the National Science Foundation (Award #1352143), Intel Labs, and the Second Amendment to the Valero-Benicia Good Neighbor Steering Committee Settlement.