A Bay Area company is using cars as a new way to track air quality.
Here's how Aclima's technology works: Air brought into the system through a funnel on the side of a car is carried through tubes and then into a monitor stored in the trunk, allowing the company to measure air quality neighborhood by neighborhood.
"We are taking a data point every one second," said Melissa Lunden, chief scientist at Aclima. "The active sampling with the pumps is what allows us to get that resolution of data and have it be responsive to the conditions on the street."
Aclima puts its cars on the road 24/7 to measure how air quality changes across the day.
Local health groups say it's the most accurate data they see.
"It's been very important for us to be able to characterize what we're breathing when we're walking around on the street rather than from a monitoring tower 70 feet off the ground someplace," said Brian Beveridge, co-director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project.
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