Urbanova: Integration of Smart City Sensors and Air Quality Modeling in a Western US City

Urbanova is a consortium of university, city, public utility companies and other urban partners focused on the development of smart city technologies to promote community and individual well-being and health in an area located near central Spokane, WA, USA. This portion of the Spokane urban area exhibits a gradient of landuse types encompassing a modern university district, a growing commercial area, and low-to-medium income residential neighborhoods. This urban area is bisected by the I-90 freeway and a major railroad line along with a network of busy arterial and surface streets. In this paper, we describe the initial deployment of a network of smart sensors for air quality and related parameters and use results from this network to inform a high resolution urban modeling system: ENVI-Met. The initial sensors include measurements of CO₂, PM_2.5, temperature, humidity, and pressure using novel, inexpensive small sensors deployed in smart streetlights. In this paper, the urban computational fluid dynamics model, ENVI-Met is used with sensor data for PM_2.5 to estimate roadway PM emissions. This is a first step toward an integrated, multi-scale measurement and modeling system for Urbanova including more than a dozen sensors, a research grade reference monitoring site, the AIRPACT air quality forecast system operating with 4 km and 1.3 km grid sizes, and high resolution WRF-Urban modeling.