On August 30, the EPA launched the Smart City Air Challenge: a unique experiment and opportunity for cities and communities to improve air quality monitoring and data sharing that offers two awards of up to $40,000, with an additional $10,000 available a year later (based on performance).
“To qualify for the challenge, communities will need to submit plans for deploying hundreds of air quality sensors and managing the data they collect.”
In brief, there are four main constraints when building your application:
- Deploy 250-500 sensors in a community
- Involve the community in the purchase and usage of sensors
- Identify partners to create a sustainable and successful project
- Share the resulting air quality data – as well as your data management plan – with the public.
In addition, applications must be submitted before October 28, and the application team must include a governmental party.
Continue reading to discover how BreezoMeter can help you win this unique challenge, or schedule a meeting with us now!
The Smart City Solutions by BreezoMeter
Featured in the EPA Smart City Air Challenge resources for our Experiment with Cisco, BreezoMeter is the world’s leading expert in air quality data monitoring and management.
In the exact spirit of the challenge, our Smart City Sensor Solution first helps communities define:
- The number and locations of sensors to reach the highest accuracy
- The types of pollutants that should be measured
- How to store, manage, analyze, and use the mass data generated
Following the sensor implementation phase, the Smart City Data Analysis Solution empowers communities to make sense of the collected data, ensure accuracy, and share actionable and impactful data, including AQI, major pollutants, health recommendations, and pollution alerts with residents.
Taking air pollution monitoring a step further, the innovative Air Quality Command and Control platform – available as a standalone product or easily integrable into existing IT systems – enables cities and communities to:
- Be action focused – Preempt impending pollution crises by advancing daily city management – from optimizing traffic lights to tracking a specific pollution source – in real time.
- Monitor & evaluate impact – Monitor which policies are working and share their success using pollutant-specific reports, historic air-quality tracking, and real-time alerts.
- Improve urban planning – Leverage historic air quality analyses to find the optimal locations for schools, hospitals, or green spaces, in order to improve the city’s air quality and quality of life.
Its key features are:
- Real-time alerts on pollution events
- Pollution predictions and forecasts based on real-time conditions
- Smart analytics to limit, reroute, or optimize road traffic
- Real-time, shareable, and actionable health recommendations for residents
- Progress monitoring
- Policy goal tracking
- Air quality analytics for urban planning
To summarize, cities of the future need to be healthy, actively preventing and reacting to air pollution events, providing residents with information on risks and progress, and offering health tips. With recent technological breakthroughs in data analytics, cloud computing, and future development of low-cost sensors, cities can start acting on reversing air pollution immediately. They can make the most of initiatives like the Smart City Air Challenge, so that we start to see – and celebrate – cleaner skies.
Get started today: schedule a call with us!
Top Image credit: © Apur – Mairie de Paris
