I am David, one of Plume Labs' founders. Thank you for all your feedback!
At Plume Labs we build tools to help people fend off pollution. This starts with an urban weather report (the Plume Air Report) that tells you when pollution will be high for a few hours or more in your city, and what you can do about it – timing your run, biking, activities with children – to take back control of your environment.
The map discussed here is a near realtime visualization of air pollution levels worldwide. The colors and the Plume Index are based on WHO recommendations. (Blue corresponds to levels below the W.H.O. yearly recommendations, light blue is below the W.H.O. daily recommendations etc.) The map takes into account the main pollutants (NO2, O3, PM10, PM2.5) and is based on measurements made in 11,000 monitoring stations worldwide along with air quality models for the areas that are not covered by monitoring stations.
More details as well as pollution predictions are available on the mobile version of the Plume Air Report
It's a very interesting project and quite attractive.
However as others mentioned it would be useful to see some sort of scale for the dots, scale for the colors, and specifics on those numbers. For example, I have no idea what "Blue corresponds to levels below the W.H.O. yearly recommendations, light blue is below the W.H.O. daily recommendations etc." means... Does that mean "In one day at a Blue dot you will breathe in a whole year's worth of particulates, while at a light blue dot for one day you will breathe in one day's worth of particulates?"
As it stands, I will stick with aqicn.org for my Chinese pollution forecast simply because it has much more, more specific, information for me -- including intra-city maps. It would be more useful to me if there was perhaps a radio button where I could change between PM2.5 and NO2 for example.
It is very cool to see this on a worldwide scale though. And don't US embassies have public air quality data that you can scrape to fill out things like Africa? Or is that just US embassies in China...?
You sorely need a legend to go with that map. What are circles (when you click you learn they are cities, but I should be able to know that before I click) what does size of circle mean? What does the color mean?
There is also something that looks like clouds. What are they? Also pollution? Are they on the same color scale as the circles?
At Plume Labs we build tools to help people fend off pollution. This starts with an urban weather report (the Plume Air Report) that tells you when pollution will be high for a few hours or more in your city, and what you can do about it – timing your run, biking, activities with children – to take back control of your environment.
The map discussed here is a near realtime visualization of air pollution levels worldwide. The colors and the Plume Index are based on WHO recommendations. (Blue corresponds to levels below the W.H.O. yearly recommendations, light blue is below the W.H.O. daily recommendations etc.) The map takes into account the main pollutants (NO2, O3, PM10, PM2.5) and is based on measurements made in 11,000 monitoring stations worldwide along with air quality models for the areas that are not covered by monitoring stations.
More details as well as pollution predictions are available on the mobile version of the Plume Air Report
iOS => https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/plume-air-report-pollution/i...
Android => https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plumelabs....
We try to make the air we breathe more transparent, and we hope you find it useful!