Urban traffic pollution - a big data approach

General project description (<400 words)
Urban traffic is the predominant source of air pollution in urban areas. In particular, traffic emits particulate matter and nitrogen oxides both of which have major impacts upon public health. Worldwide, urbanisation is increasing with corresponding increases in traffic related infrastructure. Hence there is a clear need to better understand urban vehicle pollution.

This project will combine atmospheric science and environmental health academics from the University of Birmingham with big data company The Floow Limited. The Floow Limited is a telematics company which specializes in the analytics of vehicle driving behaviour. The company actively collects and has a huge repository of past anonymised mobility trace information, including vehicle location, speed and acceleration. The PhD student will be based predominantly at the University but will also spend significant amounts of time at the offices of The Floow and will be embedded in their R&D team. The student will play an active and exciting role helping to take this new partnership to the next level.

To best understand and control urban pollution a high resolution understanding is required to manage urban environments in which people live and move. The combination of telematics data with the air pollution and meteorology data, routinely collected in Birmingham, will generate a unique data set with which to understand vehicle pollution and how driving conditions and driver characteristics affect it. The project will evaluate how the combination of meteorological conditions, driving characteristics and road infrastructure effect ambient air pollution concentrations. The air pollution data will be obtained from previous field campaigns, the Birmingham based data from the DEFRA run Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) of air pollution monitors. New data will also be generated using targeted field campaigns using the University of Birmingham mobile atmospheric pollution laboratory. Meteorological data will be provided by the emerging crowdsourced / VGI datafeeds grounded by standard observations from the Birmingham Urban Climate Laboratory (BUCL) which is led by Co-I Lee Chapman.

In particular the project will evaluate how traffic calming measures, effective use of traffic lights and other vehicle based infrastructure affects air pollution levels. We will liaise closely with Birmingham City Council about the project with whom we have a long standing relationship through past and ongoing projects. The project will provide policy relevant outcomes for reducing urban air pollution.