Fine-scale spatiotemporal air pollution analysis using mobile monitors on Google Street View vehicles
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People are increasingly concerned with understanding their personal environment, including possible exposure to harmful air pollutants. In order to make informed decisions on their day-to-day activities, they are interested in real-time information on a localized scale. Publicly available, fine-scale, high-quality air pollution measurements acquired using mobile monitors represent a paradigm shift in measurement technologies. A methodological framework utilizing these increasingly fine-scale measurements to provide real-time air pollution maps as well as short-term air quality forecasts on a fine-resolution spatial scale could prove to be instrumental in increasing public awareness and understanding. The Google Street View study provides a unique source of data with spatial and temporal complexities, with the potential to provide information about commuter exposure and hot spots within city streets with high traffic. We develop a computationally-efficient spatiotemporal model for these data and use the model to make high-resolution maps of current air pollution levels and short-term forecasts. We also show via an experiment that mobile networks are far more informative than an equally-sized fixed-location networks. This modeling framework has important real-world implications in understanding citizens' personal environments, as data production and real-time availability continue to be driven by the ongoing development and improvement of mobile measurement technologies.
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