Street Level Air Quality Modelling in Lancaster

Posted on by Thomas Pinder

Person riding a bike with trailer to collect air quality data

Data Collection

In May 2022, DSNE members Matt Amos, Rachael Duncan, Jez Carter, Thomas Pinder and Paul Young were joined by Doug Booker in collecting mobile air quality data around Lancaster. Using two sensors supplied by Doug of NAQTS, a car and bike were tasked with covering Lancaster’s road network for five days. Measurements were taken roughly every second, with pollutants such as particulate matter and ultrafines being measured. Doug, driving the car, carried out two 3-hour shifts with a daily 1.5-2hour bike ride being done by the remaining members.

Data Analysis

Along with Lily Goldsborough, the group seek to use the data to build on the recent work of Pinder et. al. (2022) and build a street-level model of air pollution in Lancaster. This would allow for air pollution levels to be modelled at a metre-to-metre resolution. Further to this, the group are developing a web app. Within the app, users will be able to plan routes around Lancaster and visualise the air pollution they would be exposed to during the given route. Once processed, the data will also be packaged up into a Python package with accompanying data wrangling functions that will allow others to easily consume the dataset and build their own analyses on it.

References

Thomas Pinder, Kathryn Turnbull, Christopher Nemeth, David Leslie, Street-Level Air Pollution Modelling with Graph Gaussian Processes, in ICLR – AI for Earth and Space Science Workshop. 2022

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