Smart City Air Challenge: Resource Pages

EPA has selected the City of Baltimore and the Lafayette, La. Consolidated Government as awardees of the Smart City Air Challenge. The agency also has recognized four projects for honorable mention: New York City; Mesa County, Colo.; Raleigh, N.C. and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The following two projects were selected as awardee recipients:

  • An Air Quality Sensor Network for Greater Baltimore: This Baltimore project incorporates plans to engage several partners and neighborhoods to deploy a network of sensors in a phased approach, leveraging a scalable cloud platform for data management. They plan to assemble commercially-available components to build their sensor system and distribute the data on a City of Baltimore website.
  • Lafayette Engagement and Research Network (LEaRN): This Lafayette, La., project proposes a partnership between collegiate, local government and non-governmental organizations to deploy a network of sensors. The project has a strong data management plan that will use a scalable cloud platform. They plan to use commercially-available sensors for the project and share the data with the public in a variety of ways.

EPA is recognizing these four projects for honorable mention because of their innovation and potential to help other communities:

  • Healthy Mesa County & Mesa County Health Department: Smart City Air Challenge Solution: Mesa, Colo.
  • Air Quality Crowdsourcing Data in Minneapolis/St. Paul: Minneapolis/St. Paul
  • New York City Air Casting Project: EPA Smart City Air Challenge Solution: New York
  • Citizen science with Ground-Level Ozone Wearables Sensors (GLOWS) for real-time pollution maps across the Research Triangle: Research Triangle, N.C.

Although the challenge is closed, EPA will be available as a resource to the winners and honorable mention project teams to share knowledge about how they collect, store and manage large amounts of data. EPA encourages these communities and others to share their findings so other communities can learn from their successes, challenges and lessons.

Webinars

We held a series of webinars so communities could create strong applications to the challenge and learn about existing projects. You can find the presentations (and eventually the recordings) on the challenge webinar site.

1. Smart City Air Challenge: The Basics on September 12.

2. Smart City Air Challenge: Air Quality Sensors on September 20.

3. Smart City Air Challenge: CITI-SENSE: How 8 cities measured air quality on September 28.

4. Smart City Air Challenge: Data Management on October 13.

Feel free to post questions on the challenge website in the Discussions area.

You can see the rules of the challenge at https://www.challenge.gov/challenge/smart-city-air-challenge/.

These resource pages are designed to assist communities in developing submissions to the Smart City Air Challenge Exit, although anyone can use them to learn about using air quality sensors and their data in communities. Browse the pages for resources related to air pollution, air quality sensors, data management, city case studies, and answers to frequently asked questions. This is meant to be a sample of the many resources that exist. EPA reserves the right to include resources at our discretion, including their relevance to the challenge and in accordance with our privacy and security policies. EPA neither supports nor endorses the companies or organizations listed. They are listed to assist potential applicants in their search for data storage options.

EPA conducted the challenge to encourage communities to deploy hundreds of air quality sensors and manage the resulting data. Most sensors aren’t ready for regulatory use, but they’re developing rapidly, and EPA needs to be ready to deal with the tremendous amount of data they’ll provide. Communities will create innovative strategies for collecting and managing data.

You can find more resources at the following links. These resources are intended as sources of information and they are not requirements for the challenge.