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— In this paper, we first develop a low-cost surfacebased air pollutants measurement system for the real-time air pollution monitoring and forecasting applications. Then, we compare the performance achieved by the proposed system in real-time urban environment with currently used static monitoring stations by the governmental environmental protection agency (EPA). The proposed design uses particulate matter, humidity, and temperature sensors to measure the values of the air pollutant that determines the value of the Air Quality Index (AQI). The SD storage device is interfaced with the system to store the large amount of data sensed by the system. The Arduino UNO-based processing unit integrates with the sensing units to process and control the sensed air pollutants data. The proposed system is deployed in indoors and outdoor environment in under served minority communities in big cities to illustrate real-time environmental pollution measurement and monitoring applications. The system can measure, monitor and alert the level of PM2.5 and PM10 components of the AQI as they are often the main pollutant that determines the AQI value. The performance of the proposed system compares with the expensive data logger-based EPA-approved LDEQ sensorsbased air quality monitoring system. Our analysis shows that the measurement and monitoring performance of the proposed system is comparable with the EPA-approved LDEQ sensorsbased air quality monitoring system. The analysis also shows that there is a spatial and temporal variation of PM2.5 and PM10 values even for sites that are less than a mile apart. The interaction interphase of the system is simpler and easier to use as compared with bulky display systems in traditional EPA-based monitoring systems. In contrast with the traditional data logger-based system, the proposed system is smaller and quicker to deploy to test specific air pollutants in interested urban and rural locations .