Airlitical| Surface-to-Air (Quality) Mission

Project Details

Awards & Nominations

Airlitical has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Local Peoples' Choice Winner
Global Nominee

The Challenge | Surface-to-Air (Quality) Mission

Your challenge is to integrate NASA data, ground-based air quality data, and citizen science data to create an air quality surface that displays the most accurate data for a location and time. Create algorithms that select or weight the best data from several sources for a specific time and location, and display that information.

Airlitical

Airlitical is aimed at making air quality data accessible and understandable for everyone to use.

Airlitical

The Problem:

Ella Kissi-Debrah was just a 9 year old girl who died from a fatal asthma attack. She lived 25m from the South Circular Road, in London. A 2018 report said it was likely unlawful levels of pollution contributed to her fatal asthma attack.

Moreover, 4.6 million people die each year across the world from causes directly attributable to air pollution (from a consultation at the WHO headquarters in Geneva 12-14 Feb 2019)

According to a survey we created, 75% of participants are concerned about pollution affecting their health.

However, availability of information concerning air quality are huge problems. The information is often open-source and available, but difficult to find or get to. Any data that is available is hard to understand. For example the data NASA provide is split up into individual gas pollutants, which is more than the average user needs.

The Solution:

Our solution is a website which provides users with an interactive and live air quality map, giving you all the information you need within the touch of a button. Our map provides a detailed and universal air quality index which is easy to use and understand.

How it Works:

Airlitical processes lots of different kinds of data to produce a very accurate universal air pollution index. By removing all the unnecessary information, such as different individual gas pollutant levels, Airlitical interactive and live map is easy to use and understand. Unlike other air pollution maps, Airlitical focuses on individual street by street data creating a tailored experience for users. By using live traffic data, we can predict and create up-to-date air pollution levels with high-precision, just like any traffic map (https://airlitical.live/index.html).

Attached to this index is a 'Map a Journey' tool (https://airlitical.live/map-a-journey.html). Using all the data we have gathered and plotted onto our live and interactive map, Airlitical can provide users with a low-pollution journey from A to B.

Our Data:

Airlitical uses data from many sources:

  • NASA data - including different air pollutant types and levels
  • Local City data - more in-depth data (e.g. Transport for London)
  • Traffic data - represents how much air pollution is created


Our algorithms can process these different data types to create a universal air pollution index with great precision, and which is easy to use and understand.


Website:

Open Source Code:

Data sources: