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Understanding the air sensor data management, visualization, and analysis needs of government air quality organizations in the United States
Citation:
Clements, A., G. Hagler, R. Brown, D. Garver, Ronald Evans, Samuel Barrette, E. McMahon, D. Vallano, R. Judge, S. Waldo, Henry Wallace, A. Mebust, C. Mocka, D. Smith, AND A. Kaufman. Understanding the air sensor data management, visualization, and analysis needs of government air quality organizations in the United States. National Ambient Air Monitoring Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, August 22 - 25, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
Federal, State, Local, and Tribal air monitoring agencies are adapting to the growing use of air sensors and large volume of air quality data they produce. To understand the current practices, unmet needs, and future outlooks associated with data management, analysis, and visualization, EPA's Office of Research and Development led open-ended interviews with 19 air monitoring agencies. This presentation will review those findings as well as efforts to describe the current landscape and potential solutions to issues involving data hosting, data quality, code sharing, and data analytical tools for attendees of the 2022 National Ambient Air Monitoring Conference.
Description:
Air sensor use has grown in multiple sectors in the United States, including in use by air monitoring agencies at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels. Sensors are being used for a variety of non-regulatory supplemental and informational monitoring purposes including supplemental, near source, and hotspot monitoring projects. Realizing the full benefit of this new technology, however, is limited by the extent to which the data can be attained, processed, and analyzed by the user. To understand the current practices, unmet needs, and future outlooks associated with these tasks for federal, state, local, and tribal air monitoring agencies, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development led unstructured and open-ended interviews in late 2019 with 19 government air organizations. Based on the dialogues, the organizations were grouped into three levels of use: Level 1) limited use (e.g., educational demonstrations); Level 2) growing use in temporary monitoring, data quality evaluation; and Level 3) sensors are routinely integrated into meeting the organization’s goal. After this dialogue stage, a cross-EPA team evaluated the landscape of existing and in-development solutions to the identified unmet needs, focusing on Level 2 users who faced the greatest barriers to progression in their use of air sensor data. The unmet needs focused upon include data hosting, data quality, code sharing, and data analytics tools. The team then identified a subset of potential steps that EPA may consider in trying to address some of these needs.