How Kīlauea is helping communities worldwide

August 2021—Tūtū Pele provided researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a valuable learning opportunity to test low-cost sensors that could benefit communities worldwide to measure, track, and inform residents about local air quality. Dr. Elizabeth Cole and Ilene Grossman from The Kohala Center collaborated with the MIT team and researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa to co-author “Mapping pollution exposure and chemistry during an extreme air quality event (the 2018 Kīlauea eruption) using a low-cost sensor network,” summarizing the three-year research program conducted on Hawai‘i Island.