Mobile lab to scope out air hazards
Determined to pinpoint what kind of pollution is swirling in the air around the region's ports, a crew of scientists this week will begin cruising Southern California streets and freeways in a one-of-a-kind mobile research lab.
In a car equipped with $450,000 worth of the world's most sophisticated air monitors and a wind sensor protruding like a giant metal claw from the roof, researchers Tuesday will begin sampling the air in several South Bay communities, examining exhaust from cars, trucks and other sources.
"We want real-life conditions, and if real-life conditions means people in traffic, then that's what we want," said Kathleen Kozawa, 28, a UCLA School of Public Health doctoral student who was at the wheel of the mobile lab on a recent weekday.
Chasing pollution in a laboratory on wheels helps fill gaping holes in data about what we breathe in sprawling Southern California, which has just 35 fixed air-monitoring stations spread across 10,743 square miles.
The scientists, from the California Air Resources Board, completed a similar study a few years ago, showing how much bad air we breathe in our cars.
The publicly funded researchers learned that commuters on the Harbor and Long Beach freeways ingested half of their daily pollution while on the road -- even though most people spend just 6% of their day driving.
"We're taking the instruments to where people live and where people spend their time -- in their cars and their neighborhoods," said Scott Fruin, an air resources board pollution specialist who helped design and build the mobile lab and is now a USC assistant professor.
For the latest experiment, Fruin and other air board staff borrowed a discontinued model of an electric Toyota RAV-4 (so they wouldn't be measuring their own exhaust), ripped out the back seats and sawed, nailed, clamped and bungee-corded to the innards a dozen sophisticated monitors, a police "stalker vision" video camera, five marine batteries weighing a combined 400 pounds and a tangle of extension cords. On the roof they glued the giant claw to locate wind direction and plumes and a jumbo antennae to track humidity and temperature.
For the first study, completed in 2004 in a nearly identical lab, the scientists drove and re-drove a 75-mile freeway loop between Pasadena and Long Beach.
They learned that the air in a moving vehicle can change dozens of times in an hour, even if the windows are closed.
