Monitoring Black Carbon, Toxic Metals, and Road Dust in West Oakland, CA

Sonoma Technology is working with WOEIP to conduct advanced air quality monitoring in West Oakland and lay the scientific foundation for community action to mitigate traffic-related pollution problems, as well as toxic metals emitted from local industrial facilities and re-suspended in local road dust.</p>

This project is building upon prior work by our team and WOEIP and will help establish a baseline understanding of community air quality and track how that air quality is changing over time. The project will also provide air quality information specific to individual neighborhoods (“hyper-local” data of keen interest to community members), and help identify pollution sources and quantify their emissions.</p>

Sonoma Technology is implementing continuous real-time monitoring networks in multiple neighborhoods and building advanced data dashboards to make the data accessible to the community. Two advanced monitoring approaches used in this project are:</p>
</ul><li><b>Black carbon (BC) measurements</b> using a network of AethLabs MicroAeth MA350 real-time sensors to provide long-term measurements of changes in BC concentrations over time and to identify areas with high BC concentrations.</li></p>
<li><b>Toxic metals and dust measurements</b> using high-time resolution sampling to determine concentration levels and sources of toxic metals and dust using a Cooper Environmental Xact 625i to quantify metals, such as arsenic (As), barium (Ba), cadmium (Cd), calcium (Ca), Cr, cobalt (Co), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), manganese (Mn), nickel (Ni), selenium (Se), silver (Ag), tin (Sn), titanium (Ti), thallium (Tl), vanadium (V), and zinc (Zn) in the ambient air. </li></ul></p>

These data will be combined with meteorological data to determine the location of sources of metals and quantify toxics and dust concentrations for comparison with emission inventory data.</p>

In addition, the team is analyzing the benefits of street sweeping as an air pollution mitigation tool, and educating community students about air quality through our <a href="https://kidsmakingsense.org/" target="_blank">Kids Making Sense® program</a href>.