By Davida Herzl, Co-founder and CEO, Aclima

Ten years ago, I moved to Silicon Valley to start building Aclima, inspired by the stories of mission-driven and brilliant people coming together to solve the world’s hardest problems. Legendary companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and Xerox Parc, responsible for technology advancements that moved society forward by leaps and bounds, spoke to what was possible. I couldn’t imagine a more important problem than climate change. And I was convinced that the technology community had a big role to play in giving people the tools to understand and reduce emissions and their impacts on both human and planetary health.  

Aclima’s roving sensor network has been measuring air pollution and greenhouse gases block by block, across portside and border communities in San Diego since March 2019. Today we released an online hyperlocal air quality report sharing the seasonal averages for all measured pollutants for summer (June-September) and fall (September-December) 2019.

Early Tuesday morning in San Francisco, a massive five-alarm fire erupted in a building supply company according to the San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD). Smoke from the fire rose in a plume high above ground level and was blown northeastward by the winds aloft. Aclima’s network of mobile and stationary air quality sensors picked up the local spikes in fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) in the hours after the fire began. We continued to see elevated PM₂.₅ levels — particularly in the East Bay — until the valiant and commendable people of the SFFD all but extinguished it midday. However, firefighters remain on the scene as the debris continues to burn.

Scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Envair, and Aclima analyzed millions of block-by-block measurements (2016–2017) of air quality in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and California’s Central Valley with Aclima sensing technology on Google Street View cars, and confirmed that air pollution can persistently vary by six to eight times from one block to another.

During her keynote at Collision from Home today, our co-founder and CEO Davida Herzl announced that Aclima and Google are making a massive air pollution dataset freely available to the scientific community. Over the course of four years, the two companies have together generated and aggregated more than 42 million hyperlocal air quality measurements throughout California.

Hyperlocal Air Pollution Mapping to Accelerate and Support Climate Action and Public Health Initiatives

Today we announced our plans to deploy our mobile air quality sensing fleet in New York for the first time. This summer in Brooklyn, we will generate and analyze millions of air pollution and greenhouse gas measurements, block by block, day and night, weekdays and weekends.

In February and March, physical distancing initiatives to slow the spread of COVID-19 resulted in reduced travel, which correlated with declines in air pollutant levels around the world. In April, however, we began to see an increase in air pollutants in parts of California, as measured by both regulatory monitors and Aclima’s mobile sensing network.