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Long-term evaluation of air sensor technology under ambient conditions in Denver, Colorado
Citation:
Feinberg, S., R. Williams, G. Hagler, J. Rickard, R. Brown, D. Garver, G. Harshfield, P. Stauffer, E. Mattson, R. Judge, AND S. Garvey. Long-term evaluation of air sensor technology under ambient conditions in Denver, Colorado. Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. Copernicus Publications, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, 11(8):4605-4615, (2018). https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-11-4605-2018
Impact/Purpose:
Next generation air monitoring (NGAM) is a quickly evolving and expanding field. Low-cost air pollution sensors have improved the access for both citizens and researchers to obtain pollutant concentration data in more locations. Many new sensors are now sold and marketed to consumers, and come with messaging on implications for health. In addition to improving the accessibility of measurement data, air pollution sensors have been used to supplement ambient air monitoring by providing high spatial density and high time-resolution measurements (Snyder et al., 2013, Kaufman et al., 2017). Evaluating how well these sensors perform in both laboratory and field environments is critical for understanding their possible uses in research, citizen science, and consumer use, for individual exposure assessment (Woodall et al., 2017).
Description:
Air pollution sensors are quickly proliferating for use in a wide variety of applications, with a low price point that supports use in high-density networks, citizen science, and individual consumer use. This emerging technology motivates the assessment under real-world conditions, including varying pollution levels and environmental conditions. A seven-month, systematic field evaluation of low-cost air pollution sensors was performed in Denver, Colorado, over 2015–2016; the location was chosen to evaluate the sensors in a high-altitude, cool, and dry climate. A suite of particulate matter (PM), ozone (O3), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) sensors were deployed in triplicate and were collocated with federal equivalent method (FEM) monitors at an urban regulatory site. Sensors were evaluated for their data completeness, correlation with reference monitors, and ability to reproduce trends in pollution data, such as daily concentration values and wind-direction patterns. Most sensors showed high data completeness when data loggers were functioning properly. The sensors displayed a range of correlations with reference instruments, from poor to very high (e.g., hourly-average PM Pearson correlations with reference measurements varied from 0.01 to 0.86). Some sensors showed a change in response to laboratory audits/testing from before the sampling campaign to afterwards, such as Aeroqual, where the O3 response slope changed from about 1.2 to 0.6. Some PM sensors measured wind-direction and time-of-day trends similar to those measured by reference monitors, while others did not. This study showed different results for sensor performance than previous studies performed by the U.S. EPA and others, which could be due to different geographic location, meteorology, and aerosol properties. These results imply that continued field testing is necessary to understand emerging air sensing technology.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Long-term evaluation of air sensor technology under ambient conditions in Denver, Colorado