Tracking Pollution Globally CMU Researchers Team Up With Climate TRACE To Model Emissions
Aaron AupperleeTuesday, October 7, 2025Print this page.
A first-of-its-kind tool that better tracks pollution worldwide has Carnegie Mellon University research at its core.
Climate TRACE, a nonprofit co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, released an air pollution monitoring tool that shows the flow of air pollution plumes from their sources. The tool relies on visualizations and modeling developed by CMU's CREATE Lab to make the threat of microscopic, harmful particulate matter (PM2.5) from sources around the world visible to everyone.
"With Climate TRACE, we added a new dimension to the discussion of how to intervene against pollution," said Amy Gottsegen, a developer at the CREATE Lab in CMU's School of Computer Science. "These models show the human cost of greenhouse gases and particulate pollution. With this data, people might make decisions about where to invest time and money to help, or make both moral and economic arguments that consider what is happening globally and locally."
The Climate TRACE tool currently visualizes 9,560 sources of PM2.5 in 2,572 urban areas around the world, reflecting every power plant, heavy manufacturing site, port, refinery and mine in these areas. Tiny orange dots representing pollution emerge from points on a map and spread across the area. The flow of orange dots changes with the weather and can show the difference between prevailing conditions and the city's worst conditions, which can further exacerbate existing levels of pollution.
The maps will look familiar to many people in Pittsburgh and around Western Pennsylvania who have reported and tracked PM2.5 and other emissions for years thanks to the CREATE Lab. The lab, which uses technology and collaboration to tackle societal concerns and promote initiatives — including environmental awareness and visualizing global and local narratives — deployed Plume Pittsburgh in 2021. The tool combines crowdsourced odor data from another CREATE Lab-developed tool, SmellPGH, and detailed weather models to track pollution from some of the region's largest industrial emitters as it spreads across Allegheny County.
Climate TRACE turned to the CREATE Lab in the Robotics Institute for its expertise in tracking and modeling non-greenhouse gas emissions, which stay close to the ground and can shift directions with the wind. When the CREATE Lab first started working with Climate TRACE, the organization asked for an example of the lab's work. The researchers showed them Plume Pittsburgh.
"They said, 'Oh my gosh, can you do this for places all over the world?'" Gottsegen said.
The CREATE Lab worked with Climate TRACE to use the coalition's data to create emission models similar to Plume Pittsburgh but using examples from around the world. That work, including a slide showing emissions in Pittsburgh, eventually made its way into a presentation Gore gave last fall during the United Nations Climate Change Conference. During the presentation, Gore heralded the research from CMU's CREATE Lab.
"Seeing Al Gore give that talk and seeing how he used our work gave me a lot of pride," said Ana Hoffman, the air quality program director in the CREATE Lab. "He did our intentions justice. He elevated the local impact that has a personal and human motivation for us."
The CREATE Lab continues to work locally. The researchers hope to publish an in-depth analysis of economic impacts from the steel industry in Western Pennsylvania later this year. And people can still access tools on their website, including Plume Pittsburgh, SmellPGH and BreatheCam — a series of high-resolution, zoomable, live camera feeds of industrial pollution sources in the Mon Valley and throughout the Pittsburgh region designed to help residents discover more about their air.
More information about the CREATE Lab is available on its website. To learn more about Climate TRACE, visit its website.
Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu