Air Pollution Monitoring

Smart air pollution monitoring solutions are helping cities everywhere to better understand and improve air quality to provide a higher quality of life for their citizens. Air pollution monitoring technology measures the amount of pollutants throughout a city’s footprint, as well as changes and trends in the growth of air pollution and types of contaminants. Armed with this data, cities can implement policy and technology designed to reduce and control pollution, and to better communicate with citizens about the quality of the air they breathe.

The benefits of air pollution monitoring include:

• Protecting and improving public health. The effects of poor air quality and ecological disasters cause serious health risks that result in in legal exposure, higher healthcare costs, declines in tourism and other negative consequences. Effective air pollution monitoring can help cities to avoid these risks through better planning and communication.
• Ensuring regulatory compliance. Air pollution monitoring can help cities to avoid violations of regulatory requirements like the Clean Air Act.
• Avoid costly ecological disasters. Air pollution monitoring can provide early warning of potential leaks from factories and industrial facilities that may cause high levels of pollutants to be emitted into the environment.

The technology behind air pollution monitoring

Successful air pollution monitoring requires several layers of technology that must work together seamlessly to capture, transmit, transform and interpret data about air quality.

• Air quality monitoring sensors on vehicles or embedded in infrastructure throughout the city can provide data on air quality and levels of contaminants. This sensor data can be combined with anonymized cell phone data to help better understand how citizens are exposed to areas of poor air quality as they travel throughout the city.
• Air pollution monitoring also requires a high-performing network that can connect thousands of sensors and transmit the vast amount of real-time data they produce back to city servers.
• An analytics platform aggregates raw data, analyzes it and transforms it to produce actionable intelligence that can inform policy and technology choices.
• Data from analytics platforms is interpreted through user interfaces such as dashboards, maps and reports that extract high-value insights and recommendations for city managers to review.

Air pollution monitoring systems can be combined with technology for dust monitoring, temperature monitoring and water quality monitoring to provide a 360° view of threats to environmental health.

Spectrum Enterprise: connectivity for air pollution monitoring

Spectrum Enterprise provides the foundation of connectivity that smart cities require to implement air pollution monitoring solutions as well as other smart technologies like smart parking systems, smart waste management and power monitoring for smart electrical grids.