The Q1 2026 refresh of our Open Climate Data portal went live this morning. This is the first substantive update since the October release, and it includes several changes worth describing in detail, both for our regular data users and for anyone who is new to the portal.
Everything described below is free to access, with no account required for reading. API access for programmatic queries is available with a free developer account.
What Is New in This Release
Four new indicators. We have added nighttime cooling differential, impervious surface percentage, residential filtration coverage estimate, and public tree canopy change (rolling 3-year window) to the indicator catalog. Each of these emerged as a high-demand addition in our user survey last fall. Full methodology notes are published alongside each indicator.
Neighborhood-level resolution for air quality. Previously our air quality data rolled up to census tract. We are now publishing at the neighborhood level (as defined by the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability's neighborhood coalition boundaries), which gives substantially more granular views of exposure patterns. 312 sensor nodes now feed the hourly air quality layer.
Expanded historical time series for water quality. Through a data-sharing agreement with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, we have added monthly water quality data back to 2003 for 14 major sites in the Willamette and Columbia basins. This effectively triples the historical window available for trend analysis.
New downloadable dataset: MicroplasticWatch 2022–2025. Four years of quarterly microplastic concentration data from 28 sampling stations is now available as a bulk download (CSV, Parquet, or GeoPackage formats). Methodology documentation is extensive; this one has been a long time in coming and represents substantial field and lab work by our research team.
Performance and accessibility improvements. The full dashboard is now WCAG 2.2 AA compliant. Chart rendering is roughly 40 percent faster on mobile devices. All charts include downloadable alt-text data tables.
How to Read the New Air Quality Layer
A note specifically about the neighborhood-level air quality view, because it has a subtlety worth understanding.
Each neighborhood polygon displays an inverse-distance-weighted PM2.5 value aggregated from the sensor nodes that fall within it, averaged over the selected time window. If a neighborhood contains no sensor nodes, the value is interpolated from the three nearest external nodes, with uncertainty indicators displayed alongside. Interpolated values are visually distinguished from directly measured values.
This matters because, for the neighborhoods with the fewest sensors, the displayed value has meaningfully wider uncertainty bands. We have chosen to display interpolated values rather than leave gaps, but users should interpret them accordingly. We are expanding the sensor network to 500 nodes over the next two years, which will bring most neighborhoods up to direct measurement.
The Most Striking Finding in This Refresh
One pattern from the updated data is worth calling out, because it emerged more clearly at the finer resolution than it did at the census tract level.
The correlation between nighttime cooling differential and residential filtration coverage is striking. The neighborhoods with the worst nighttime cooling (a proxy for heat vulnerability) are also the neighborhoods with the lowest estimated residential filtration coverage (a proxy for smoke vulnerability). These are the same neighborhoods we have identified in previous work as highest-exposure on air quality and highest-exposure on urban heat.
The statistical story is that these are not independent vulnerabilities. They cluster together, geographically and demographically. Any intervention strategy that treats them separately will miss the people most in need of both.
At the policy level, this argues strongly for integrated resilience investment — hubs, filtration distribution, tree plantings, and reflective surface programs deployed together in the same neighborhoods — rather than discrete siloed programs. We will publish a policy brief on this in May.
For Researchers and Journalists
A few notes for technical users.
The MicroplasticWatch dataset is, to our knowledge, the longest continuous community-scale microplastic monitoring record available anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. It was collected using standardized NOAA Marine Debris Program methods with a few modifications for freshwater contexts, fully documented in the methodology PDF.
We welcome academic collaboration. If you are using the data in published research, please cite as: TerraFuture Open Climate Data Portal, retrieval date, url. If you are using the data in journalism, please reach out for a pre-publication fact-check; our research team is glad to verify that findings are being represented accurately.
The API is rate-limited at 10,000 requests per day per developer account. If you need higher limits, contact our data team. Educational and nonprofit users regularly receive expanded access.
What Comes Next
The Q2 refresh in July will add watershed health indicators, urban tree canopy mapping at the parcel level (pending completion of the 2025 LiDAR flyover processing), and a new heat vulnerability composite index.
Between quarterly refreshes, the dashboard pulls updates from our sensor network continuously, so most air quality and temperature views are effectively real-time. Water quality and microplastic data remain quarterly due to the laboratory analysis timelines involved.
As always, the dashboard is only useful to the degree it gets used. Thank you to the 14,800 unique users who accessed the portal in Q1. If there are indicators you wish we had, datasets we should prioritize, or access features that would help your work, we read every suggestion that comes through the feedback form.
