The team behind the pollution-monitoring tool Plume Pittsburgh is taking its models global.
Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab partnered with the nonprofit Climate TRACE to build an animated map that shows how particle pollution spreads from 9,560 industrial sources in 2,572 urban areas around the world.
The map shows orange dots popping up from places such as power plants, refineries, and mines and spreading over nearby cities. In some cases, the map is nearly covered in orange dots.
Climate TRACE, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has developed a global inventory of more than 660 million sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
Amy Gottsegen, a developer at CREATE Lab who helped build the map, called that data a “perfect match” for the lab’s work, because it puts global information into a consistent format.
“The trickiest thing to think through was that the whole concept for Plume Pittsburgh was based on a lot of deep, regional knowledge of Pittsburgh and many years of collaboration with air quality advocates in Pittsburgh,” Gottsegen said. “How do we replicate this globally for a lot of places that we don’t have that local familiarity with?”
Plume Pittsburgh shows data from every day, which Gottsegen said would have been nearly impossible to replicate on a global scale.
She said they decided to create maps for two scenarios: a typical day, and one with high exposure.
“We know that in Pittsburgh, so much of the health harms that are caused by local industrial facilities happen on the days where there’s inversions and the meteorology is sort of amplifying the effects of what’s coming out of these facilities,” she said.
Gottsegen said she hopes the map can amplify the work of local environmental justice advocates.
“ If anything, I hope that this tool would motivate people to find those advocates and listen to them and follow their lead on how we can make progress on this issue,” she said.
Particulate pollution from industrial sources is believed to be responsible for nearly 9 million deaths each year, according to Climate TRACE.
The group said the new tool shows the direct connection between the climate crisis and air pollution that threatens public health.
