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Data Quality

General
#1

Hi,

I live within a few miles of a major international airport. There’s a group of concerned citizens that are interested in measuring pollution and noise, in hopes to share data with local government and affect change.

Can someone please speak to the quality of the data using these sensors. I realize this isn’t a scientific or industrial application. How good is the data? Can I present this data to my local council with a high degree of confidence? What can I do to improve its quality?

I found this link online from the Air Quality Egg project. http://airqualityegg.wikispaces.com/Data+Quality.
Are some of the constraints outlined in this document the same for this project? I look forward to a good discussion.

Thank you,

Christian
Minneapolis, MN

#2

Hello Christian

We can tell that the kits after calibration are totally reliable. Without calibration we can have slight differences between same kits, in this case the target is not to have detailed data for everyone but to understand tendencies

Some of the features we are working on is online calibration, so you can reference the sensors to much more expensive units and introduce the values to do auto calibration

Another future feature will be self-calibration based on more expensive (100 more) stations paid by governments, but with less spatial resolution

We share the same sensors used at the AQE, and we manage to make some important improvements there, so you can consider that the NO2 and CO descriptions and considerations are basically the same: low cost, low power, etc.

To improve data quality:

  • Calibration
  • New version with more accurate gas sensors will be coming this year, but will be around double the price

Let us know if this helps at all

best

Tomas

#3

Hi Tomas,

Thank you for your reply. I’d be interested to take a look at your CO and NO2 sensors coming out.

I live about 5 km away from the St. Paul - Minneapolis International Airport and plane noise and pollution are big issues here. The airport commission is in talks, and would like to expand and have dedicated take off and landing routes, thus concentrating flights.

For us this will likely mean, more noise, and more pollution. Typically planes when they take off are around 700 to 1200 feet when they fly over my house. They generate a lot of noise as you can probably imagine. Soon as the weather gets warmer, I’ll start measuring this.

I’ve shared your project with people who are members of a couple citizen action committees and they are very interested in the Smart Citizen project. I’ve been invited to speak to a group and then meet with a Minneapolis City Council member. They have an interest to start their own project and so we’ll discuss their goals and requirements.

Regards,

Christian

#4

Ok, just let us know how it goes with your kit, online calibration can be done centrally, which we hope to have ready based on a comparison curve with other much more expensive sensors, once we have it we can extrapolate for all the online sensors, but will be still not extremely calibrated, but good enough to get tendencies and relate the noise with the levels of pollution

#5

Cool - I like the sound of that.