Google’s Street View Cars to monitor pollution in the UK now

Google has included censors on two cars that will be patrolling around the city of London next month onwards. These sensors are programmed to record air quality readings every 30 meters to study and monitor the air quality around the streets of London. Along with this, they have also installed 100 such sensors on various lampposts and buildings especially around areas of increasing pollution levels leading to an improved monitoring network to maintain air quality. London’s mayor Sadiq Khan believes this to be “the most sophisticated network in the world”.

The team behind this aims at generating data for this project that spans over a period of one year in order to tackle air pollution as best as possible. These street view cars by Google have been used for monitoring air polluting for quite some time now.

As an addition to Google’s outreach program, Google has been working with a San Francisco Start-up, Aclima, for over three years now to manufacture Air Quality Censors for its Street View Cars. These sensors were installed in cars to monitor air quality in the Bay area. These devices are built in order to measure hazardous chemicals that are harmful to the lungs like carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, black carbon and other similar Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).

The main aim of this project is to provide the data of rising pollution levels to the public in order to make them aware of the increasing health hazards that they can face due to the breathing of adulterated air. Aclima founder Davida Herzl says “We know that trees absorb pollution, NO2 specifically. If we can know where pollution hotspots are, we can know where to put green spaces.”