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Village Green Design, Operations, and Maintenance Document
Citation:
Kimbrough, Sue, R. Williams, R. Duvall, T. McArthur, AND C. Williams. Village Green Design, Operations, and Maintenance Document. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-18/037, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The purpose of this report is to document the building, operation and maintenance of a Village Green Bench.
Description:
The Village Green Project is a community-based activity to demonstrate the capabilities of new real-time monitoring technology for residents and citizen scientists to learn about local air quality. The goal of the project is to provide the public and communities with information previously not available about their local air quality and engage communities in air pollution awareness. A pilot station in Durham, North Carolina has demonstrated the system’s ability to monitor several common air pollutants in real-time and make the data available online and by smartphone. The Village Green Project is expanding to other communities across the U.S. to evaluate the station’s operation under different weather conditions and to increase awareness of this new community-based air quality monitoring system developed by EPA. The purpose of this report is to document the building, operation and maintenance of a Village Green Bench. The term “village green” refers to outside open areas where people congregate, typically in the center of a town or settlement, such as parks and playgrounds. The Village Green (VG) ambient air quality monitoring system described in this document measures particulate matter (PM) of less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5), ozone, wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity (RH), and temperature, along with site-specific measurements in a “village green” type of environment. In the Village Green Project (VGP), data is uploaded in real time to a website for display, logging, and later retrieval. The entire VG air monitoring system, including measurement devices, a solar-powered system, and hardware for the data processing and wireless communication module, is installed in an assembly that is aesthetically inviting to the public and complements a park, playground, or other outdoor setting.