CLEAN AIR COMPASS

OpenAQ is co-leading a collaborative, community-informed initiative to develop a customizable open-source data management system (DMS) for air quality measurement data. This easy-to-use DMS will be available as open-source code for any entity to tailor to their needs, helping to solve for the fact that current air quality monitoring efforts must either rely on proprietary systems or build their DMS from scratch. To ensure the DMS meets the needs of a wide range of organizations monitoring air quality, a community of practice representing different geographies and data expertise (COMPASS) is securing stakeholder feedback from around the world. Learn more at Clean Air COMPASS.

CLEAN AIR CATALYST 

The Clean Air Catalyst is a global partnership to accelerate clean air solutions by building understanding of pollution sources, designing locally tailored solutions, and creating strategic coalitions to enact long-lasting change. Three pilots led by local teams in Indore (India), Jakarta (Indonesia) and Nairobi (Kenya) are winding down in 2025, but air quality monitoring will continue, along with aggregation of the data by OpenAQ. Over the course of the partnership, OpenAQ enhanced the capacity of the pilot cities to use the data effectively and helped organize workshops on source awareness and data collection in Indore and Jakarta. 

EPIC AIR QUALITY FUND

This ambitious project aims to expand access to air quality data to 1 billion people by 2030. Run by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), the EPIC Air Quality Fund is supporting local organizations in installing monitors in communities that could benefit the most – communities located in countries where pollution levels are very high, there is little to no monitoring and little to no data sharing, and opportunities exist to effect national-level policy changes and pollution reductions. OpenAQ is aggregating data from the awardees’ projects, making it findable to a global audience so as to maximize the impact of the data. We are also amplifying the projects and building tools to help gauge impact.

PREDICTING WHAT WE BREATHE

OpenAQ has partnered with the City of Los Angeles and California State University Los Angeles on two NASA-funded projects and is now supporting a third NASA-funded project. OpenAQ assists the team with data aggregation and normalization as well as workshop development and execution.

The first project, Predicting What We Breathe (PWWB) built a highly accurate open-source machine learning model (>94% accuracy for a 24-hour period) for L.A. County that provides hourly air quality predictions for six major pollutants at an extremely high spatial resolution of 250 m2. Using these predictions, local officials can now issue more timely and effective on-the-ground interventions and better understand the impact of their efforts to reduce air pollution. The PWWB model is an open-source tool available to jurisdictions worldwide to enhance pollution mitigation.

The second project, PEACE for EEJ, expanded the PWWB predictive model to incorporate socioeconomic, demographic and health data that helps Los Angeles support neighborhoods and communities that face higher exposures to air pollution and experience greater health impacts. The project engaged with organizations representing minorities, immigrants, the poor and the elderly to co-create project tools, including a mobile app and a web application dashboard.

The third project, an Earth System Digital Twin for Wildfire, will develop a comprehensive digital twin for wildfire to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and real-time responsiveness of wildfire responses strategies. This will include visualizing the current and future status of fire and air quality and potential response scenarios.