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Field Assessment of the Village Green Project: An Autonomous Community Air Quality Monitoring System
Citation:
Jiao, W., G. Hagler, R. Williams, B. Sharpe, Lewis Weinstock, AND J. Rice. Field Assessment of the Village Green Project: An Autonomous Community Air Quality Monitoring System. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 49(10):6085-6092, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
This paper describes the design and field performance of the Village Green Project protoype, which is a solar-powered air monitoring station integrated into a park bench.
Description:
Recent findings on air pollution levels in communities motivate new technologies to assess air pollution at finer spatial scale. The Village Green Project (VGP) is a novel approach using commercially-available technology for long-term community environments air pollution measurements. Solar-powered VGP integrates a park bench with an air monitoring system using compact instruments that measure ozone, PM2.5 and meteorological parameters. Data is streamed each minute, and after automated quality checks, becomes available online in real time. The station collected over 5500 hours of data the first ten months with about 13 days (5.5%) of downtime due to power loss. Additional data loss was due to infrequent technical issues/maintenance. VGP performance was evaluated by comparing to nearby air monitoring stations operating federal equivalent methods (FEM). VGP measurements tracked the nearest benchmark FEMs for hourly ozone [CVGP (ppb) = 0.83CFEM + 7.9, r2=0.77] and PM2.5 [CVGP (µg/m3) = 0.93CFEM - 0.36, r2=0.76]. VGP estimated Air Quality Index (AQI) resulted in identical AQI levels 97% and 88% of the time for ozone and PM2.5, respectively, compared to AQI derived utilizing FEM data collected one mile away. VGP demonstrates potential viability of autonomous monitoring stations to meet a variety of air quality monitoring needs.
