A pollution-tracking tool born in Pittsburgh is now shaping global climate accountability.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers who built Plume Pittsburgh — a website that visualizes daily emissions from Clairton Coke Works, Irvin Works and Edgar Thomson Works — also helped develop Climate TRACE, the global pollution tracker unveiled by environmental advocate and former Vice President Al Gore at New York Climate Week in late September.
Climate TRACE partnered with CMU’s CREATE Lab to visualize the spread of pollution from 9,560 industrial facilities around the world — including several “super-emitters” that expose 900 million people to pollution worldwide.
“The biggest aspiration … is to really put an environmental justice focus on conversations around climate change, and show how the same facilities that are causing these global problems of our shifting environment are also having a real impact on the communities that are in their backyard,” said Amy Gottsegen, a CREATE Lab research developer.
Plume Pittsburgh, launched in 2021 from a partnership between the CREATE Lab and the Breathe Project, depicts how air pollution from the region’s three largest polluters spreads across the region.
It combines annual emissions reports from U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, Irvin Works and Edgar Thomson Works with detailed NOAA weather data — including wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity — to display how air pollution is dispersed throughout the region.
That data is layered on top of reports from Smell Pittsburgh, a website the CREATE Lab launched in 2017 for locals to report foul odors likely caused by pollution.
Matt Mehalik, executive director of local advocacy coalition the Breathe Project, said Plume Pittsburgh helps people visualize invisible pollution. Modern pollution often doesn’t look the way it does in old movies, he said, with black smoke pouring out of stacks. Instead, it’s fine particulate matter, and it’s even more toxic than smoke, Mehalik said.
With Plume Pittsburgh, people can see the causes and patterns of local pollution.
“They know that it’s not just them,” Mehalik said. “People then get some confidence to be able to speak out, to say, ‘Look, this is not acceptable.’ There are people living in other cities around the country that don’t have to put up with that, but we in Pittsburgh still do.”
Gottsegen, who helped develop both projects, said checking Plume Pittsburgh isn’t like checking the weather to plan your day (that’s partly because the tool is one day behind as it bases depictions on the previous day’s weather).
Instead, Gottsegen said community members worried about air quality use the tool for “case making,” to showcase the impact of pollution.
Tools like Plume Pittsburgh and Climate TRACE are important parts of climate advocacy work, Mehalik said, because they help people actually see the widespread problem. His hope is that the tools empower people to speak out and demand clean air.
“That’s the biggest thing about what these tools offer, is — people’s voices do matter,” he said. “People’s experience matters a great deal.”
Tory Basile is an editorial intern at Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at tory@publicsource.org.
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