"Google Earth Has Cars Sniffing U.S. Cities to Guard Your Health"

"As firefighters fought to control deadly wildfires north of San Francisco last month, a small unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google had a more modest goal. It had employees driving cars around loaded with air-monitoring equipment to measure how badly the smoke was polluting the air.

The conclusion: a lot.

Google Earth Outreach is a decade-old research unit that helps nonprofit groups, scientists and governments take advantage of mapping technology to clean the air and improve public health -- or, at least, understand what the problems are.

On Tuesday [Nov. 7], the project released street-by-street pollution maps of San Francisco, Los Angeles and California’s Central Valley. Previous work measured air pollution in Oakland, and methane leaks in Boston, Indianapolis and other cities."

Eric Roston reports for Bloomberg November 7, 2017.