About this project

air.grid is a live atlas of U.S. air quality, industrial emissions, and the schools and neighborhoods that sit next to them. Every layer on the map is drawn from open government data — no estimates, no interpolation. If a facility is there, it was reported to the EPA. If a sensor reading is there, it came from an official or community monitoring network within the last refresh cycle.

The project joins four data streams that are rarely seen together: real-time air quality from AirNow, PurpleAir, and OpenAQ; industrial emissions reported under the EPA Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) and the EPA ECHO permit database; school locations and enrollment from NCES and IPEDS; and Census tract demographics from the American Community Survey. A geospatial proximity join links every school to its nearest emitters and sensors, and flags campuses that are downwind of a reporting facility within 10 km.

The Grid Analysis page summarises what that join reveals: which facilities emit the most, which regions carry the heaviest load, which schools are most exposed, and which majority-minority Census tracts overlap with the highest-emitting sites. None of this is new information — it is all public record. air.grid just puts it on one map.