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Changing the Paradigm of Air Pollution Monitoring
Citation:
Snyder, E., Tim Watkins, P. Solomon, E. Thoma, R. Williams, G. Hagler, D. Shelow, D. Hindin, Vasu Kilaru, AND P. Preuss. Changing the Paradigm of Air Pollution Monitoring. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Indianapolis, IN, 47(20):11369-11914, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory′s (NERL′s) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA′s mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD′s research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA′s strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.
Description:
Historically, approaches for monitoring air pollution generally use expensive, complex, stationary equipment,1,2 which limits who collects data, why data are collected, and how data are accessed. This paradigm is changing with the materialization of lower-cost, easy-to-use, portable air pollution monitors (sensors) that provide high-time resolution data in near real-time. These attributes provide opportunities to enhance a range of existing air pollution monitoring capabilities and perhaps provide avenues to new air monitoring applications. Sensors tied to advances in computing and communication also provide enhanced availability and accessibility of air monitoring data. Sensor devices are currently available to monitor a range of air pollutants and new devices are continually being introduced.3 Meanwhile, the emergence of information on the high spatial variability of primary air pollutants 4−10 and per capita increase in asthma or other health conditions sensitive to air pollution 11 motivates finer-grained and more personalized air monitoring data collection. Indeed, the attraction toward lower cost sensors is sufficiently great that, even before sensor performance has been characterized, widespread data collection and data sharing using new sensors is already occurring (http://airqualityegg.com/). However, challenges remain regarding the use of sensors and sensor data, chiefly sensor data quality and derivation of meaningful information from data sets.
URLs/Downloads:
FINAL FINAL CLEAN CHANGING_THE_PARADIGM_TO_EST_080113.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 545.576 KB, about PDF)Environmental Science & Technology
