Opening Up the World’s Real-Time Air Quality Data

OpenAQ is building the first real-time, open air quality data hub for the world to empower the public, influence policy, and enable previously impossible science. It aims to do this by engaging science, media, and tech communities at both local and global levels. OpenAQ addresses the data-gap problem in a straightforward yet unprecedented way: We take existing data available on those disparate, existing public websites, aggregate them and make them dramatically more transparent and useful to the public.

Visit openaq.org to learn about OpenAQ’s aggregated data, data source locations, and the community of researchers, software developers, educators and journalists using air quality data to fight air inequality.

For more information:

Closing the Air Quality Data Gap in the Developing World: How a husband-and-wife team created the world’s first open-access, open-source international air quality data hub. By Kathleen Pierce

Challenge

Poor air quality is responsible for 1 out of 8 deaths in the world, more than malaria and HIV/AIDS combined. This is not a problem that will go away any time soon. The most polluted places are often greatly under-studied and/or have little AQ data publicly available compared to many less polluted places.

A lack of air quality data around the world creates several gaps in research, policy and public engagement:

• Key public health questions remain, such as: What is the precise relationship between mortality and air quality in severely polluted places, where billions live? Scientists understand this relationship to a much higher degree in less polluted places like the European Union and United States, but in places where this fundamental research is most needed, we don’t.

• Currently, satellite measurements and ground measurements are used to estimate levels of air quality, even in places where there is not monitoring. This data is not real-time, synchronously captured, or reported in a standard format.

• Testing new low-cost air quality sensors in the field requires access to more standard, real-time measurements. In many polluted places, accessing real-time air quality data is extremely difficult at best and often impossible.

• Without basic outdoor air quality data, it is impossible for policymakers and the public to know whether mitigation policies are working and how to adjust those policies when they are not.

There are actually thousands of stations throughout the world publicly publishing air quality data. However, global and local communities do not have easy access to this information because often the data resides on obscure websites showing only current values, is inaccessible or is in inconsistent data formats. Groups that do aggregate data (e.g. aqicn.org, berkeleyearth.org, and airvisual.com), while excellent initiatives, don’t openly share unprocessed global data historically or programmatically in the forms that would make them transformational to scientific, media, and policy communities at both local and global levels.

Contact

Christa Hasenkopf

Co-Founder, OpenAQ

The Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are collaborating to use cloud-computing and Earth and space science to advance solutions to community challenges related to natural resources, climate change and natural hazards. After an open call for projects, four winners were chosen whose projects exemplify this goal. Each prototype is being moved to the AWS platform where they will be made publicly available for other communities to use and expand upon. Read more.