See How LA Belches Emissions, Block by Block | WIRED

Researchers quantify the emissions of every road and building in the nearly 5,000 square miles of the Los Angeles metro area. Your city could be next.

Matt Simon

08.26.2019 09:00 AM
Hovering above the iconic Hollywood sign is Southern California’s other icon: smog. After decades of gains fighting the menace, LA is now losing ground, clocking a 10 percent rise in deaths from ozone pollution between 2010 and 2017. Cars, of course, are the major contributor to smog, but vehicles (and power plants and industry and airports) also put out an invisible menace—the CO2 that’s warming the planet.

Problem, though: You can’t just train a satellite on LA to quantify the emissions coming from each street. For one, you’d have a hard time telling vehicle sources of CO2 from trees along the road, which are respirating their own carbon dioxide. Plus, the wind is blowing the greenhouse gas all over the place, so it’d be hard to tell the origin of a plume in a gusty day.

So instead of relying on satellites alone, a group of researchers combed through data from a dizzying number of publicly available sources, looking at everything from traffic patterns to utilities data to air pollution reporting, to quantify the emissions from not just every road but every building in the nearly 5,000 square miles of the Los Angeles megacity. Such an incredible resolution could help the city focus its carbon mitigation efforts, for instance bolstering public transport to relieve particularly congested roadways. The larger quest is to build a block-by-block forecasting system for cities around the country—monitoring emissions hour by hour, month by month, year by year—to get smarter about tackling emissions for the health of the public and the planet.

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