e-Science in the Streets: Urban Pollution Monitoring

Current pollution monitoring systems use small numbers of fixed sensors that report multiple species of pollutant. In the UK, online archives of such monitoring sites go back over 30 years. Such archives give a detailed picture of trends in pollution and characteristics of specific pollutants such as average levels at different time-scales. However pollution levels can vary at a small scale. For example, carbon monoxide is concentrated around transport routes and disperses rapidly over a few tens of metres. This project investigates local variations in pollution by using mobile sensors. These sensors aren’t as well calibrated as fixed sensors, but they do give a spatial picture of pollution variation. We are integrating readings from multiple mobile sensors to create maps of pollution variation at a per-street level in order to enable new kinds of investigation of pollution. We are also planning to investigate remote collaboration between scientists in the field and in the lab by using a collaborative visualisation system.