Interesting Link: The LAUSD's air quality sensor network
During the January fires in Los Angeles, a lot of people relied on air quality readings from Purple Air, an air quality sensor company which allows its customers to publish real time air quality data to a global map available on its website. I'd say this website was the most commonly-recommended air-quality-specific data map I saw recommended during the fires.
It's cool that this exists, but I admit, I'm always skeptical of the data it provides. That air quality map is, effectively, an advertisement for buying Purple Air's air quality sensors. Sure, you can call it "citizen science," but these sensors cost multiple hundreds of dollars. They're not ever going to achieve a uniform distribution, and they're not ever going to be able to exercise oversight over how the sensors are installed or maintained.
Conspicuously, these Purple Air sensors are also impossible to find in some of LA's poorer neighborhoods. South Central is just... not here! It's just empty!!
After noticing this, I was surprised and pleased to learn that the LA Unified School District has its OWN air quality sensor network. You can see it here. It doesn't cover the entire LA area, because it's just in regions where the LAUSD operates the schools... but it's pretty dang good in those regions.
The sensor distribution is quite uniform (because you gotta have schools everywhere). They made a deliberate attempt to have the sensors cover as many 2.5km wide "neighborhood" regions as possible, including the neighborhoods which Purple Air very conspicuously does not cover.
On the page linked above you can see some writing about why the sensor network was created - specifically to address wildfire smoke. LA has terrible air quality, but the fact that it was fires that pushed the LAUSD to install sensors says a lot about how badly fires have impacted this area over the last few decades.
I did some googling to see if other school systems in the US have their own outdoor air quality sensor network, and I discovered a bunch with indoor air quality sensors, but not a bunch with outdoor ones. I was looking for other school systems near wildfire territory and couldn't find a similar system-wide network, but I'm sure I missed one. There's also several cities which rely on services like Purple Air to assess risk to students, rather than their own sensors. If you know about one with its own system that I missed (and you are able to contact me haha), let me know.
Anyway, I thought this was cool in a kind of "the sci fi dystopia future is here and it's actually a lot more interesting to me than it is depressing" kind of a way. It is always super neat when public services use public money to do real shit to keep people safe, and in the current moment, I'm loving a data source which is owned by neither the federal government nor tech oligarchs. This is the kind of work that local places should be doing more often.