If you search for your city on a new map and zoom in, you can see pollution drifting from factories, power plants, and ports into your neighborhood. The map—a first-of-its-kind air quality tool from Climate TRACE, a nonprofit coalition cofounded by former Vice President Al Gore—shows how pollution moves through cities.
The new interactive tool, launching September 24, is powered by a sophisticated model that tracks local air pollution and weather data and feeds the map. It shows PM 2.5 pollution (responsible for nearly 9 million deaths each year globally) in more than 2,500 cities.
Orange dots indicate sources of pollution, with a stream of smaller dots showing how it moves over the city, shifting course with the wind. Right now, the map presents snapshots of average and bad air days in each city. But it will later offer data in near real time.
“Eventually, we will have it on a daily basis, so that if you have a child with asthma or if you have family members with lung and heart conditions that make them sensitive to air pollution, you can go to your favorite weather app and see exactly what the pollution flows have been through your neighborhood that particular day,” Gore says.
Health researchers can use the data to see how pollution is linked to disease at the neighborhood level. Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, for example, has one of the highest levels of air pollution in the world. One community in the area, called Reserve, has a cancer rate 50 times higher than the U.S. average.
The tool’s visualizations can aid policymakers in making the case for more state regulation and help the worst-polluting sites transition to cleaner tech. (As the Environmental Protection Agency moves to stop collecting some emissions data, Climate TRACE, which stands for “tracking real-time atmospheric carbon emissions,” can also help partially fill that data gap.) Companies can use its data to identify and replace the worst polluters in their supply chains.
Because the same sources are responsible for both climate emissions and air pollution, highlighting the health impacts also helps build support for climate action. “Connecting those two streams of pollution, and tracing them back to the same combustion process, makes it easier to understand exactly why we have to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels,” says Gore.
The coalition launched in 2020 to track greenhouse gas emissions using satellite images, other data, and machine learning to estimate the pollution emitted by industrial sites. Last year, the group added “co-pollutants” like particulate matter and sulfur dioxide to its database, using data on the size and type of each polluting site.
The new tool can help make the issue of air pollution seem more immediate and personal.
“My experience with everyone I’ve showed this to is that it feels abstract until they see themselves in the story,” says Gavin McCormick, cofounder of Climate TRACE. “You can show people on a map where their house is, they can show you where their kid goes to school, and you can see the pollution. I think that’s just kind of making people realize this is happening to them.”