Google cars drive across Europe and measure street air quality

We probably don’t need to remind our readers much of the concept of Street View. A popular tool for virtual browsing of streets or monuments is one of the best that the American Google has to offer. It uses to map images as part of street mapping specially adapted cars with cameras that are no longer completely unknown to us. But did you know that dozens of these cars since 2015 they also map the air quality in the streets? Among other things, this data is collected by the Google website Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) as part of the Air View project. EIE is based on sharing data not only from cars, but also from public sources, and we can also find Czech cities among them.

But Google itself is trying to contribute in its own advanced ways. In 2018, together with partners, he began to create a comprehensive map of air quality at London territory, a few days ago, in cooperation with universities and other institutions, also provided a map for Copenhagen. And now he’s heading to another Nordic capital. Specifically in Dublin now the Jaguar I-PACE electric car is running to take care of the same measurements from Aclima sensors.

This electric car is planned to be sent as well to other European cities, so we can hope that Prague will, for example, see the Environmental Insights Explorer and Air View. Although we would probably find better candidates for similar measurements. The analysis detects, for example, the presence of nitrogen oxides or airborne particles.

Do you have an overview of how your municipality is doing with air pollution?

Zdroj: Google