How UC Santa Cruz Is Using Drones to Help Communities Read Air Quality Before It’s Too Late

If you live in a community that gets hammered by wildfire smoke, agricultural drift, or industrial emissions, “check the air quality” can be easy advice to give and hard advice to follow. The closest official monitor might be miles away, and the conditions can change street by street. If the only way to see the data is an online dashboard that assumes a stable internet connection, the people who need the information most can be the least able to access it.

That is the gap a UC Santa Cruz research effort is trying to close in California’s Pajaro Valley and North Monterey County, where many residents work outdoors in agriculture.

The Project – Advancing Intelligent Resilience with Wildfire-Informed Sensing for Agriculture, (aka AIRWISE), is led by UC Santa Cruz applied mathematics professor Javier González-Rocha. AIRWISE is building a community-centered monitoring network that pairs drones with low-cost sensors, then turns that data into something people can actually use in the moment.

The Problem: Starting Work Before the Sunrise Is Not a Solution

A key finding behind the push for better monitoring is a pattern that feels unfair, but makes physical sense.

As seasons change, farmworkers have to start work progressively earlier to beat the sun – the earlier you start outdoor work, you’re less exposed to UV rays, and the ambient temperature is cooler. My aviation students love knowing that when I drag them outside at 7AM and it’s 40 degrees outside!

We know that earlier hours reduce heat stress, but Gonzalez-Rocha’s drone measurements flagged a tradeoff: from dusk to dawn, as the planet cools, pollutants in the air ultimately settle closer to the ground.

These pollutants get trapped inside of pockets of stable air, and as a crew makes it out to the farm for the day, they’re already breathing in heavily polluted air.

According to The Mercury News, “the pollutants of concern are the usual heavy hitters in California air quality conversations:”

• PM2.5 (fine particulate matter), often tied to wildfire smoke and combustion sources, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream.
• Ground-level ozone, which can irritate and damage airways and is formed through chemical reactions involving emissions and volatile organic compounds.

That “pollution near sunrise” point matters because it shifts air quality from a general regional issue into a minute-by-minute, town-wide safety question: Is it actually safe to be outside right now, at this exact time, where you live and work?

What UCSC and partners are deploying right now

On the ground, the team has been expanding sensor coverage in places that make immediate community sense, especially near schools in the North Monterey County and Pajaro Valley Unified School Districts.

The deployed monitors include PurpleAir sensors that stream real-time air quality data. A feature that keeps coming up in this work is the built-in LED color display, which gives a quick, language-independent signal of current conditions.

UC Santa Cruz’s July 2025 update put the number at about 25 new sensors deployed near schools and other locations, explicitly aimed at filling gaps in local monitoring coverage.

The project also has a practical “why now” catalyst. Residents in the region have dealt with major smoke events for years, and UCSC notes that after the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire, unhealthy air lingered for extended periods.

Just as important as the hardware is the partnership model. UCSC is working alongside Regeneración, a Watsonville-based climate justice organization, to shape how the information is communicated and used. That includes listening sessions and focus on culturally relevant ways to share risk information without simply increasing fear in communities that cannot easily “just move away from the pollution.”

Why Drones Are The Missing Piece, not a Gadget

A ground sensor tells you what is happening where the sensor sits. That is valuable, but it is still a slice of a three-dimensional problem.

Drones let the team take vertical measurements, collecting data at different heights to understand how pollution is layered in the lower atmosphere. In the Pajaro Valley work, those profiles have already helped reveal that pollutants can be most concentrated during the coolest hours right before sunrise.

The Next Step: Sensors That Work Even When Wi-Fi Does Not

Low-cost sensors come with a real-world limitation that gets ignored in a lot of “smart city” talk: power and connectivity.

Both the UCSC update and regional reporting have highlighted that requiring Wi-Fi can be a deal-breaker for some households. In the Mercury News coverage, a farmworker described internet costs as expensive and unreliable, and the article notes that without Wi-Fi, some PurpleAir devices cannot transmit data.

That is where the “new system” gets especially interesting for drone and sensor folks. González-Rocha’s team is developing new low-cost sensors designed not to depend on Wi-Fi. The approach described is straightforward and scalable: use long-range radio to send readings to a central receiver node, and make that node the only part of the chain that needs Wi-Fi to forward data. The sensors are also described as having solar panels, enabling placement in more locations, including remote fields.

This is the difference between “a sensor network that looks good as a project” and a system that can actually survive in practice.

What “Protection” Looks Like When the Data is Usable

Air quality data does not fix air quality. But it can reduce harm in ways that add up:

• Schools can decide whether outdoor sports, recess, or PE should move indoors based on what is happening at the campus, not a monitor across town.
• Families managing asthma and other respiratory risks get a simple, visible cue about when to close windows and limit outdoor time.
• Outdoor workers and employers can plan around smoke episodes when possible, and take exposure-reduction steps recommended by occupational health guidance during wildfire smoke events.

Even the broader framing behind the project is grounded in real public-health basics: fine particle pollution is linked to respiratory and cardiovascular impacts, and the most affected groups often include children, older adults, and people with heart or lung disease.

DroneXL’s Take

This is exactly the kind of “drone work” that gets overlooked because it is not flashy. No racing, no cinematic reveal, animated weapons release trailers *cough* Anduril *cough*.

But from an educator’s perspective, it is what drones are good at: rapidly sampling hard-to-measure spaces, then feeding that into a usable data set. I don’t care if you’re using a drone to take picture on vacation, or if you’re using one to map the entirety of the United States- at the end of the day every drone shares the same purpose: they’re tools. With these tools, people can definitely cause harm, but they can also bring immeasurable positivity and benefit to millions of people globally.

The part to watch is whether the team’s off-grid sensor concept can scale without turning into a maintenance nightmare. If they can keep the cost low, make the network resilient, and keep the user interface as simple as “look at the light,” this is a blueprint other companies could copy on a global scale.

I’m interested to know if you’d be open to implementing one of these sensors on or around your home, let me know down below!