June 10, 2020
New database seeks to democratize air pollution data for research
With the goal of democratizing air pollution data, University of Washington Civil & Environmental Engineering researchers helped launch a first-of-its-kind publicly available database that provides access to long-term information about air pollution concentrations and economic damages caused by human exposure to air pollution.
The database was developed by researchers at The Center for Air, Climate and Energy Solutions, a collaborative research center created with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that involves faculty and students from UW, Carnegie Mellon, University of Minnesota and other universities.
The database provides information that can be used to study the relationship between air pollution exposures and health and to document exposures and disparities over time. Data is available for six major pollutants for which the EPA has set concentration standards. The datasets are more extensive than previous studies, going back as far as 40 years for some pollutants.