July 25, 2021
How Air Quality Affects Health at a Local Level & What You Can Do About It
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For five years we have helped communities measure their air. JustAir V2 is about what comes after the measurement: turning trusted data into a decision you can act on.
More data was supposed to mean more action. But data does not act. A decision does, and only one that someone trusts enough to move on. That trust takes two things: air quality data that actually holds up, and awareness that reaches people in a way that makes sense for their community.
In those years, working alongside the people who want to use air data for change, health departments, school nurses, residents, and advocates, we kept seeing the same pattern. You can have all the air quality data in the world and still get stuck on the questions between a reading and a decision you trust:
Answering those is the leap from a reading to a decision you can trust, and it starts with a shared source of truth. A single city might have several air networks running at once, different measurement devices, different quality standards, all describing the same air. We work to find the one ground truth underneath it: defensible, auditable, and transparent about its uncertainties.
Up to now, JustAir grew one feature at a time, in response to what partners asked for. V2 is different: it is the first time we rebuilt the whole platform, so you can bring any data source through one pipeline and turn it into decisions you can act on.
V2 is built in four layers, and one principle runs through all of them: trust is earned through repeated transparency and honesty about what we know and what we don't.
That is not abstract. It is the difference between a community's claim about its own air being believed or waved off, a parent deciding whether it is safe to let the kids play outside, and a health director issuing an alert people act on, without the false alarms that make everyone stop listening.
Trust by design and intention.
Unified infrastructure made to fit any need.
Low-cost sensors, reference-grade FEM monitors, lab samples, satellite data, and other outside feeds all come into one pipeline.
Every reading is normalized to one clean standard, no more PPB vs PPM mixups, and the AQI computed the same way on every device, then anchored to real-time reference-grade monitors. We track the full chain of custody on each measurement, from the moment it lands to the moment it shows up in a report or a live dashboard.
The result is one source of truth for your whole network, no matter how many instruments or vendors it is built from.
What this gets you
Know how much to trust a reading before you act on it.
Our quality tools check, correct, watch for anomalies, and keep a full audit trail on every reading. Every change, flagging a measurement, pulling a monitor for maintenance, applying a correction, is logged with a timestamp and who made it.
New in V2 is Measurement Trust: a 0-100 score that tells you how much to trust a sensor's reading, so you can tell a real air quality event from hardware that needs a look.
What this gets you
Good data only matters if people can reach and understand it.
We rebuilt the public dashboard to be intuitive, mobile-first, ADA compliant, and available in Spanish, with more languages coming. And you do not have to build the infrastructure yourself. There are three ways in:
InfrastructureA public dashboard anyone can use, in their language, with the alerts they choose, mobile-first, and instant in any browser.
What this gets you
This is the "now what." Trusted data only matters if it unlocks a decision, so this is where V2 gets local, answering the questions a neighborhood actually asks:
Is the air bad in my neighborhood, or just at the monitor across town? A trusted reading feeds a continuous surface, with wind and back-trajectory layered in, so you see the air where you actually are, and where it is coming from.
Will the air be bad later today? Forecast the spike 1, 2, 4, and 6 hours out, with the confidence shown, so you can act before it arrives, and warn the people most at risk, children, older adults, and anyone with asthma or a heart condition.
Why was the air bad two days ago? Every event gets logged, not just the 4th of July. Replay any of them and check the forecast against what actually happened, so the models and your response keep improving.
Modeled surface, preliminary data, not regulatory-grade measurements.
What this gets you
Trust by design and intention.
Everything in V2 comes back to one idea: a shared, trusted source of truth is what lets communities move from collecting air quality data to acting on it, so every community can understand its air and help shape an equitable, breathable future for all.
None of this would have happened without our 30+ partners, from tribes, agencies, counties, and communities, who trusted us and pushed us on this journey. We plan to launch with them in August. If you are a community group, health department, sustainability office, researcher, health advocate, or data aggregator and want early beta access, sign up below.
Sign up for V2 →Stay tuned for next week, a deep dive on our first layer: Infrastructure.
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