Local researchers have found the air quality in Santa Monica, while generally good, gets worse on the weekends and varies across the city.
Graduate students at the Pardee RAND Graduate School conducting a research project in Santa Monica providing insights into air quality at the neighborhood level. The specificity of the data is unprecedented, as the government monitors air quality over large regions and uses mathematical models to differentiate between different areas. That approach can’t quantify how freeways, smoking and even barbecuing impact air quality in certain neighborhoods, said Todd Richmond, director of Pardee’s Tech & Narrative lab, which is conducting the pilot study.
“There are fluctuations during the day, the week and throughout the city, though in Santa Monica they are relatively minor,” said Cord Thomas, RAND’s director of emerging technology. “The data you can get from common sources will show you only one picture of Santa Monica. If you suffer from asthma or cardiac diseases, you might consider air quality in your day-to-day decisions, such as when you exercise, where you walk your dog or where your kids play.”
Federal and state governments have measured air quality over wide areas because the sensors have always been very expensive and large, but recent technological advancements have made them much cheaper and smaller, Thomas said. Researchers would have paid $50,000 for a sensor the size of a pickup truck, but internet-connected sensors cost $200 to $300 and are the size of a baseball.
RAND has taken advantage of that new economy of scale to launch one of the first hyperlocal air quality monitoring research projects, installing 20 PurpleAir sensors since last October on the homes of its employees and students who live in Santa Monica. The distribution is not entirely even – there is only one sensor in the NOMA neighborhood, while there are six in Wilmont – but the data has already presented some trends, and the researchers hope to install more sensors close to the 10 freeway before the project concludes this fall.
The most conclusive finding so far, Richmond said, is that air quality is steady during the week but deteriorates on weekends by a factor of two. While about 90,000 people live in Santa Monica, an additional 60,000 work or visit the city on weekdays. That number can increase by 160,000 to 260,000 on weekends.
The researchers cannot pinpoint why the weekend population growth impacts the air quality because there are not yet enough sensors in the city, but transportation is a likely factor, Richmond said.
“Internally, we thought the air would be worse on weekdays because of commuters,” he said. “It was a surprise.”
Despite some variation over the week, Santa Monica’s air quality is always classified as good, Richmond added. There has one notable exception since the start of the study, however: the Woolsey fire.
“When we correlated our data during the Woolsey with the main sensor in Downtown L.A., we saw similar trends but they were shifted in time,” he said. “When the wind started blowing smoke into Santa Monica, the air quality went from really good to actually unhealthful in one to two hours. It’s amazing how quickly it turned.”
While rare in Santa Monica, such poor air quality can impact lung development in children, thereby increasing the frequency of childhood disease, Thomas said. In places with average or good air quality, those with respiratory or cardiac diseases might be at risk in certain areas or times of day.
“One way you move toward improving the world is by having information about it,” he said. “A lot of people base their day-to-day decisions on the weather report, and we think people may want to base their decisions on the air quality report as well.”
The researchers are planning to spread the information in Santa Monica by engaging with City Hall and local schools. One of the graduate students in the Tech & Narrative Lab is designing a DIY sensor that is even cheaper than the commercially available version, Thomas said, and K-12 students could build their own and collect data from them as a science project relevant to their lives.
The researchers will publish the findings of the project this fall and conduct a second study in Pittsburgh, he said.
madeleine@smdp.com
