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EPA’s Village Green Project: New Directions
Citation:
Herrera, E., G. Hagler, R. Williams, W. Jiao, B. Sharpe, Lewis Weinstock, P. Dickerson, J. White, B. Johns, K. Benedict, R. Evans, AND J. Rice. EPA’s Village Green Project: New Directions. Presented at EPA Air Sensors 2014 workshop, RtTP, NC, June 09 - 10, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
The purpose of the abstract is to propose a poster for presentation at the EPA Air Sensors 2014 workshop.
Description:
The US EPA’s Village Green Project (VGP) is an example of using innovative technology to enable community-level, real-time air pollution measurements using low-cost sensor technologies. The VGP is an air monitoring system configured as a park bench located outside of a public library in Durham, NC. It contains air monitoring and meteorological instruments that measure PM2.5 (Thermo pDR-1500), ozone (2B Technologies), temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and direction. The entire station utilizes solar energy with battery backup to be self-powered and totally off the grid. In the first ten months of field sampling since June 2013, the station has successfully collected over 5300 hours of PM2.5 and ozone concentration data. To evaluate the VGP sensor system performance, data collected were compared with nearby federal equivalent methods (FEM) for PM2.5 and ozone, resulting in close comparability (e.g., r2 = 0.74 for hourly-averaged PM2.5, r2 = 0.76 for hourly ozone). Future directions involve replicating the prototype and deploying to areas of interest, such as environmental justice communities. This new effort in 2014-2015, referred to as Village Green Project II (VGPII), is supported through EPA’s E-enterprise initiative. This project will advance the technology by: 1) installing several new VGP systems in the United States with state and community partnerships; 2) developing IT scalability to easily add new stations, share/exchange data between partners, and utilize AirNow to host multiple real-time data streams; 3) increasing system capability to perform in northern locations (cold weather, lower solar conditions); and 4) exploring additional pollutants to be measured (e.g., NO2). VGPII will be a catalyst for partnerships between EPA and the states to enhance advanced monitoring opportunities and address their local needs.