AIR QUALITY INFORMATION: MAKING SENSE OF AIR POLLUTION DATA TO INFORM DECISIONS IN UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES OVERBURDENED BY AIR POLLUTION EXPOSURES
Funding Agency:
- Environmental Protection Agency
The growing use of commercially available air sensors is rapidly changing the current paradigm of air quality monitoring. Enabled by the sensors’ relative affordability and ease-of-use, the number of individuals installing air sensors in or near their homes has significantly increased in recent years. Many communities have used air sensors to conduct local air monitoring in order to build knowledge about local air quality conditions and potentially initiate efforts to improve air quality, reduce exposures, or mitigate air pollutant health effects. Across the U.S., air monitoring coverage is being improved and expanded by the Enhanced Air Monitoring for Communities grant program from the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act, as well as other funding sources to address air pollution concerns in communities, including in communities that are underserved, historically marginalized, and overburdened by pollution. EPA’s newly launched Environmental and Climate Justice Program and Community Change Grants Program are expected to support additional community air monitoring efforts. In addition, the U.S. Forest Service installs temporary monitors and sensors to measure smoke during prescribed burning and wildfires (https://wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/smoke.pl), and EPA has several sensor loan programs to enable communities to learn about air quality in their communities (https://www.epa.gov/air-sensor-toolbox/air-sensor-loan-programs; https://www.epa.gov/air-sensor-toolbox/wildfire-smoke-air-monitoring-res...). By greatly expanding the temporal and spatial coverage of air quality data from long-term fixed networks (https://www.epa.gov/outdoor-air-quality-data), air sensors can provide information on air pollutant concentrations and disparities on neighborhood scales and in areas with sparse monitoring sites, potentially providing valuable information to improve public health.
In parallel with the proliferation of air sensors, new satellite-based data are providing air pollution information at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions. TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution), launched into space in April 2023, is the first space-based instrument to monitor major air pollutants across the North American continent every daylight hour at the neighborhood scale (Naeger et al., 2021). The unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution will provide observations of air quality changes over the course of the daylight hours, and the data may be useful for understanding disparities in air pollution exposures.
Despite the immense increase in local-scale data, important challenges remain in harnessing the data into information that can be used to inform decision-making and actions that effectively address the needs of underserved communities. Expanded observational data have different spatial and temporal coverages and are nonuniform over the span of air pollutants that may be of concern to underserved communities. For example, public air sensors predominantly report surface fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations while the satellite-based TEMPO provides information about the amounts of PM and certain gases (e.g., ozone, NO2) in a vertical atmospheric column. Also, sensor data quality may vary by technology type, be influenced by environmental conditions (e.g., temperature and humidity), and change over time. Challenges to harness new observational data include: understanding the uses and limitations of available observational data and models that could be used to evaluate community air pollution concerns; developing strategies to share, access, analyze, and interpret the data; and translating the results into information that can be understood and used by community members as well as policy- and decision-makers. Social and behavioral factors also present challenges, such as building and maintaining trust between communities and other stakeholders around interpretation and evaluation of sensor data when there are discrepancies between data from sensors and regulatory monitors (Hubbell et al., 2018; Shatas and Hubbell, 2022).
Up to $1,250,000 per award.
$10,000,000
June 26, 2024: 11:59:59 pm Eastern Time
Technical Contact: Serena Chung; phone: 202-604-9084; email: chung.serena@epa.gov
Eligibility Contact: Ron Josephson; phone: 202-564-7823; email: josephson.ron@epa.gov
Electronic Submissions Contact: electronic-grant-submissions@epa.gov