Citation:

Johnson, K., A. Holder, A. Clements, S. Larkin, S. Illson, AND R. Evans. The EPA US Forest Service (USFS) AirNow Fire and Smoke Map Sensor Data Pilot. To be Presented at A-E BOSC SC Meet the Scientist, Research Triangle Park, NC, February 17 - 18, 2021.

Impact/Purpose:

Air sensors are increasingly used to report air quality and smoke concentrations from wildfires, but extensive performance evaluation is needed to develop data cleaning and correction equations to improve the accuracy of these measurement under ambient and smoke conditions. This work briefly summarizes work to evaluate a popular low-cost PM2.5 sensor (PurpleAir) across the U.S and to develop a correction equation that can improve the accuracy of reported concentrations, even during smoke impacted times. This work lead to the implementation of the data cleaning and correction algorithms when crowdsourced sensor data was added to the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map as part of the sensor data pilot. This work allowed AirNow to communicate more spatially-resolved air quality information to the public at a critical time.

Description:

This presentation, made to the Board of Scientific Counselors Air and Energy Subcommittee in February 2021, gives a brief overview of the research efforts contributing to the AirNow Sensor Data Pilot. The short slideset details the collaborators contributing to these efforts, briefly introduces the associated research efforts and what they accomplished, a summarizes why this research efforts were important to our partners, and lists research steps anticipated for the foreseeable future.

Record Details: