Emergency Mobile Monitoring for California Wildfire Smoke

Smoke from wildfires poses a severe threat to air quality, public health, and ecosystems across the United States, particularly in the West. Presently, air quality monitoring networks throughout California are fixed in space, which limits their ability to capture and characterize extreme pollution episodes that may be afar. To address this limitation, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) deploys emergency mobile sensors to monitor any hazardous airborne contaminant once a local agency has exhausted its resources to protect public health or the environment, most often due to wildfire smoke. However, CARB is confronted with a critical decision: how to strategically deploy emergency mobile sensors to effectively monitor human exposure to encroaching wildfires. Here we employ modal decomposition and Kalman filtering techniques to optimize the placement of CARB mobile sensors along a path that captures the spatial extent and temporal evolution of smoke exposure from 2006 to 2020. We suggest a generalized mobile path plan that highlights areas near the Northern Cascade region and the Central Valley region near the Sierra Nevadas. We make performance comparisons against stationary sensors and demonstrate the cost-effective approach of mobile monitors. This sensor path planning proposal holds the potential to significantly impact CARB's resource allocation strategy, enabling them to make informed decisions.