The Environmental Protection Agency awarded Baltimore with seed money Thursday to install a regionwide pollution-tracking system in an experiment to make “big data” part of environmental protection.
The $40,000 in seed money was given by the EPA to Baltimore and Lafayette, La., which were both chosen as part of a competition for the best sensor design that uses mobile technologies and “citizen scientists,” boosted by the surge in Internet-enabled products and smartphones, to monitor air pollution.
A number of other localities received honorable mentions in the competition, called the Smart City Air Challenge, including New York, Mesa County, Colo., Raleigh, N.C., and Minneapolis/St. Paul.
“I firmly believe that data can make a positive difference in human health and environmental protection,” said EPA Chief Information Officer Ann Dunkin. “We are looking forward to working with these Smart City Air Challenge awardees and honorable mention communities to share knowledge about collecting, storing and managing large amounts of data.”
The Baltimore project will see an EPA-backed sensor array strung across several neighborhoods to collect data and leverage the Internet-based cloud to store it and then distribute its findings via a website. The project in Louisiana will use commercially available products to design a sensor network with government and non-government organizations using the cloud to leverage the data collection.
Large amounts of data can be collected more easily and sifted through to provide targeted analysis than ever before. The process of collecting and sifting is commonly referred to as “Big Data,” which EPA made a priority in a draft strategy paper it issued in 2013, recommending it take steps to encourage cities and states to make use of the large amounts of data.
EPA emphasizes that the effort is an experiment to provide lessons learned, and is not being used to monitor state and city compliance with such regulations as EPA air quality standards and ozone rules.
