Community-Engaged Air Quality Monitoring in Baltimore, MD

Neighborhood-level differences in air pollution are difficult to capture with conventional monitoring networks. In partnership with the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, we built a community-based network of low-cost sensors across Baltimore to understand how pollution and heat vary across neighborhoods and over time. The project shows why that local resolution matters: environmental inequalities can shift across seasons and disappear when data are averaged across larger areas or longer periods.