Open Air Quality is about Open, Real Time Air Quality data and visualization

We believe, real time Air Quality data is of great value and opens manifold opportunities:

• What if we can send push warnings to sensitive groups of the population when they are about to enter an area of increased air pollution? • Or: imagine you could optimize your bike route or your running route with respect to air quality. • Have you ever considered local air quality when looking for a new flat?

The City of Zürich is known and proud of its high quality of living. Transparent real time air quality monitoring and visualization is a great opportunity to - communicate this and - to improve as well: It helps to identify problematic areas to take targeted measures and to quantify the effectiveness of these measures.

The Open Air Quality Team created a prototype of a mobile measurement station (MMS). The MMS is a battery powered LoRa Sensor Node gathering environmental parameters and streaming them the cloud via the ThingsNetwork. The data is visualized on a map in real time using the GPS coordinates of every measurement.

How can we get from a mobile sensor platform to real time air quality data?

The strategy to get a large number of stationary measurement locations is to motivate citizen to engage for better air quality measurements: By offering affordable MMS everyone is enabled to deploy them on balconies, roofs or in gardens. Who knows, maybe we can find sponsors to provide the sensor nodes even for free?

Additionally, we suggest to mount MMSs to vehicles of public transportation (for example busses or trams). With this, we have mobile sensor platforms which circulate on well-defined routes passing by several stationary measurement stations every circle. We think this can be used as an approach for automated recalibration of the stationary measurement stations.