Mobile air monitoring involves a sensor-equipped vehicle from Aclima which will be used in 64 communities across California to gather block-by-block air quality information.
The hope is that by gathering neighborhood specific data, more productive and cost-effective solutions can be found to protect public health.
"One of the first things you can see is really easy wins that are actually really available now and that we don't need to wait 10, 20 years," Aclima co-founder Davida Herzel said. "We can do these things now. I think that that's what will be really surprising to people, is that there's a lot of solutions in the data."
Traditional air monitoring has taken place in pre-determined stationary sites and is effective for that testing site.
But by using mobile monitoring and feeding that data to researchers across the University of California system, existing and emerging pollution concerns can be addressed - in many cases, in neighborhoods where air quality has never been tested.
"Most of the monitors that are out there can only monitor a set of pollutants, a dedicated set," Herzel said. "These pollutant monitors can do a ton more and they can do a ton more once per second, so that opens up the aperture of opportunity and so we can suddenly get a lot more data."
More than 60% of the mobile monitoring will serve low-income communities and households. Many of the drivers are like Quran Holland in Carson - residents of the community who are familiar with potential problems areas for air quality. And by partnering with more than 40 community-based organizations across the state, CARB is ensuring everyone has a voice in shaping air monitoring efforts from the beginning.
"(I) definitely think it is about time we started questioning the air quality around here and then definitely expand it to many other areas," Holland said. "Not even just Carson but all over Los Angeles County, all over the world."
The high-resolution data collected will be publicly available in a year and will be used to inform future regulatory programs and in academic research. With it, Herzl knows that California's effort can be repeated in other states as well.
"California is just an ideal place to test and prove out these different methodologies," Herzl said. "But there is a lot of potential for the technology here to get scaled and get implemented."