by John Paul Ramirez-Francogrist
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Serap Erdal stopped at a light pole in Chicago’s Grant Park, pulled out his phone and began pinching the screen. Behind him, towering skyscrapers cut through a sunny blue sky as he scanned his palm-sized map of the city. The researcher barely notices the buzz of city buses, cars and cyclists around him in a busy city centre. What was he doing in the cool summer air.
Fixed on a pole above that was one of the city’s new solar-powered air quality monitors. The tracker, encased in a metallic silver shell about the size of a tissue box, is part of the nation’s largest community air quality monitoring network. Today, the network has 277 air monitors across Chicago collecting air pollution data from every ward and community area, with an increased concentration in already overburdened areas.
A bright green dot flashed on Erdal’s phone. He smiled.
“Currently, the air quality index at this location is 31,” said Erdal, a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago. “This reading puts the air quality of the city’s public parks in the safest category of the Environmental Protection Agency, which means it poses very little risk to public health. “Because we have a clear day and it’s windy, the concentration is pretty uniform across the city,” he added.
On that day in June, nearly all of the city’s monitors were green, except for one on the South Side, where legacy industrial facilities and freight traffic pump out into nearby black and Latino neighborhoods. In the coming years, the monitoring system is expected to explain dramatically uneven air quality in different neighborhoods, even on clear and windy days.
The project, known as Open Air Chicago, went live last fall and is part of a five-year project to collect hyperlocal air quality data and provide real-time pollution information to Chicagoans. The information is also intended to help officials develop guidelines for permitting, urban planning and air quality control. The network is about to face its first Chicago summer, when air pollution is typically worse. Pollution from cars, heavy vehicles, and industry reacts with sunlight and heat to form ground-level ozone, a harmful pollutant and a key component of summer smog. Climate change is also causing smog-producing conditions to become more common as summers get longer and warmer.
The monitoring effort stemmed from a city fight over the city’s decision to move General Iron’s scrap-metal shedding operation from the mostly white Lincoln Park area to the predominantly Latino and black Southeast Side. In 2021, local environmental activists filed a civil rights complaint with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, arguing that the move discriminated against low-income communities of color and harmed their health.
The city and community groups reached an agreement in 2023, which included launching a community air monitoring network. Chicago officials partnered with the University of Illinois at Chicago to launch it last fall at a cost of more than $4 million to cover operations through the 2030s.
“This air monitoring system is creating a running record of what air quality is like in Chicago,” said Oscar Sanchez, director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, a group that has successfully filed civil rights complaints.
Residents of the South and West Sides have so far had limited means that their air is unsafe. They do have tendencies though High rate of respiratory problemsThey lacked time-stamped data to establish a link between their poor health and the region’s air quality. Sanchez says that changes the monitoring system.
“This is Chicago acting in good faith,” he said. “We’re here to make sure that there’s publicly available information so people don’t have meltdowns about their experiences.”
Each air monitor is less than a mile from the next. The low-cost equipment measures ground concentrations of two airborne pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, usually formed by the burning of fossil fuels, and PM2.5, which are particles as small as one-twentieth the width of a single human hair and capable of entering the bloodstream through a person’s respiratory system. Exposure to both pollutants is linked to childhood asthma and cardiovascular problems. PM2.5 is Increasingly singles out As the world’s leading environmental health-determining factor – associated with acute mortality and morbidity for respiratory and cardiovascular health outcomes.
Even though air quality has improved in recent decades, it can still reach unhealthy levels during the summer when sunlight and warmer temperatures combine with air pollutants to create ground-level ozone. That seasonal smoke can further degrade air quality when mixed with smoke from increasingly frequent wildfires. According to Daniel Horton, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University, climate change is exacerbating this situation in the Midwest.
“We also have to deal with the consequences of increased frequency and severity of wildfires,” Horton said. “It’s a problem that doesn’t necessarily happen in our backyard, but when the wind blows in the right direction, we suffer the consequences in the Midwest.”
Wildfire smoke now reliably turns Chicago’s summer skies a hazy orange. In 2023, smoke from record-setting Canadian wildfires reached the Windy City and raised ground-level ozone levels to about 10 percent of federal pollution limits, A study published earlier this year. The study also found that the central, west and southeast areas of Chicago were most affected by ozone.
There have been fires so far 2.5 million acres burned through Nationwide that’s nearly double the 10-year average for this time of year. A recent surge in wildfires, tied in part to climate change, is reversing the nation’s steady progress toward improving air quality. A recent study published in Science earlier this month.
Between 2003 and 2015, studies have shown that stricter federal air quality regulations successfully reduced ozone, or smog-forming toxic gases, by about 11 percent. Since 2015, however, rising ozone levels have undone nearly a third of the nation’s progress toward cleaner air — translating into an increase of 318 premature deaths per year from wildfire-related ozone since 2013.
As extreme heat reshapes air pollution in the Midwest and across the country, Horton said the Open Air Chicago network will be able to identify local pollution hot spots, providing “an unprecedented look at the air quality landscape across the entire city.”
The local network is expected to build on existing data collected by NASA satellites and the EPA’s limited number of regulatory-grade air monitoring sensors, which Horton calls the “gold standard.” While the EPA’s more sophisticated monitoring devices provide precise measurements of pollutants such as PM2.5 and nitrogen dioxide, they are more expensive to maintain. Chicago’s low-cost sensor, though less precise, captures more than 20,000 data points per day. The sheer volume of data on how air quality varies across cities is expected to yield big results.
Carl Mallings, an assistant research scientist at Morgan State University and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said local data is especially important because, in many cases, satellites are capturing an aerial view that combines the messy interplay of particles and gases throughout the layers of the atmosphere, making it difficult to detect what’s close to human breathing on Earth’s surface.
“If you see smoke plumes from satellite data in the absence of other information, it can be hard to tell if the smoke is actually reaching the surface, where it’s affecting air quality and human health, or is it rising slightly above the surface and passing over?” Dr. Malings.
Back in downtown Chicago, Erdal said the program is expected to run through 2029. City officials hope the network will stay online longer. On noisy downtown traffic, he said the network is the culmination of two decades of citizen-based research with communities on the city’s west side and southeast side. Previously, he Worked on a project to monitor vehicle emissions In several of the city’s majority-Latino neighborhoods, including helping local environmental justice workers install low-cost PurpleAir sensor.
His big goal now is that the data collected over the next five years can help create a roadmap for city officials and community leaders to reduce Chicagoans’ exposure to unsafe air.
“We hope we will strengthen the network in the future,” said Erdal. “Measuring more pollutants and providing more information to the public.”
This article originally appeared on grist A https://grist.org/equity/after-a-civil-rights-complaint-chicago-built-the-nations-largest-air-monitoring-network/.
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This is the story Originally published by grist.
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