Google uses Street View cars to map pollution

Wired : Last month, Google revealed that it had partnered with Aclima, an environmental monitoring startup, to map pollution levels for a month in Denver, Colorado. Now it is expanding to do the same in San Francisco. For several years, the two companies had been testing Aclima’s air-quality sensors at Google’s facilities around the world. Putting the sensors in Google Street View vehicles is the next step in developing the system. Devices for measuring pollutants have to account for a wide range of atmospheric variables, which makes them complex and potentially expensive. One of Aclima’s goals is to reduce the sensors’ cost significantly so that public networks of the sensors can be established. The companies are sharing the collected data with the host cities in order to help them make more informed choices about how to handle local air quality.