This sounds highly implausible for anything other than very crude and not-very-useful measurements. Quantifying air pollution is a fairly hard problem, chemically speaking. The composition of particulate matter is highly diverse as it may arise from a wide variety of sources, i.e. agricultural, industrial, wildfires, diesel engines, etc. Just looking at the particulate PM2.5/PM10, broadly speaking there's the organic carbon fraction and the inorganic metal fraction. The former is highly complex, e.g.:<p>> "The considerably increased chromatographic resolution in GC×GC [gas chromatography] allows separation of many UCM [organic carbon] compounds while the TOFMS [mass spectrometer] supplies mass spectral data of all separated compounds. However, the data sets are getting enormously complex. In a typical PM2.5 sample from Augsburg <i>more than 15,000 peaks can be detected</i>... "<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0021967303015498" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00219...</a><p>Some particulate matter may have a heavy metal fraction, some may not and that's also not easy to determine (but was a major factor in leaded gasoline pollution). Here's a sample of the kind of work that has to be done to get reliable measurements:<p>> "...using quadrupole inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry (q-ICP-MS). We report improved measurements of key aerosol elements including Al, V, Cr, Fe, Ni, Cu, and Zn in airborne coarse particulate matter (PM10)... This technique was used to determine the elemental composition of over 150 PM10 samples collected from an industrialized region in Houston, TX."<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003267010014522" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00032...</a><p>On top of that there's nitrogen oxides and PAN, ozone, etc. The only relatively inexpensive recent innovations seem to be the use of drones to collect samples for lab analysis (would have been useful in East Palestine).<p>Getting accurate measurements of all the species involved in air pollution requires a modern analytical lab packed with equipment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and highly trained technicians to operate. The press release and snippets from the paper don't address such important details at all.