Mobile lab is sniffing out Metro Vancouver's bad air quality

When assistant professor Naomi Zimmerman drove her newly purchased sprinter van down the coast to California for its retrofitting, it wasn’t to join the movement of young people converting their vans into mobile homes.The Portable Laboratory for Understanding Human-Made Emissions — PLUME for short — is one of the first fully functioning mobile labs to grace Canada’s West Coast.

This computer display contains a plethora of graphs drawing endless lines filled with spiky peaks and rounded dips, even when the van itself is parked. These graphs show the amounts of pollutants such as ozone, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and ultra fine particles that are in the air. Citizen reports guiding the research process When de Ferreyro Monticelli gets into the van on Tuesday morning for a long day of data collecting, he often relies on another UBC project, Smell Vancouver, to tell him where to go.

From nuisance to policy framework This link, Zimmerman says, is something that's relatively untouched by other researchers. Her hope is that by proving the connection, odour can become a helpful tool and not just a source of complaints. Odour mapping environmental injustice These health effects can have increasingly serious implications for communities disproportionately impacted by bad air quality or lack of proper cooling resources, say the researchers.

“It's sort of this amazing example of how much overlap there can be in these related issues of climate change, air quality and people's experience of their environment,” Zimmerman said. Where to next? Next week, de Ferreyro Monticelli plans to travel to Burnaby for another long week of eight-hour days spent sampling in the field. This, he says, will continue just until the weather begins to cool down.

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