CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

Thanks one more time to the Northern Outlook for covering the project. Front page this time! I think they covered the project quite nicely. Meanwhile the helikite is up again tonight and tomorrow so if you're in town, keep an eye out for it!

Here's the piece ONE News put together on the project and broadcast tonight. Not bad, and thanks Annie! https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/niwa-tests-revolutionary-air-quality-sensors-q07057.html

A perfect night for helikiting. Had One News around to witness the balloon being inflating and gradually raised into the air. The helikite has some meteorological instruments hanging from beneath it. It is held to the ground by a very strong cable which is winched up and down to different heights. Our NIWA team of Sally and Rowena got out the fleeces, woolly hats and soup and spent the whole night doing just that.   This information will help us understand if and when smoke is transported from ground level up above the rooftops and onto breeze, or trapped near the surface. The helikite caused a minor attraction with several cars pulling up to take a look ,and a few inquisitive children asking what we were up to. Dawn and the team are just finishing up. They catch some sleep now before doing it all again tonight.

CONA Rangiora is now well underway and some things are going really well. But it wouldn’t be as much fun if there wasn’t a few spanners in the works. Here is Sam beating an ODIN into submission. (photo Ian Longley) Firstly, most of the early participants will have been contacted by, or met, our Instrument Scientist, Sam. Sam is based in our Christchurch office and is running the ODINs, the PACMANs and the thermometers in volunteer’s homes. He is also currently confined to his couch at home having picked up the winter bug. This means a (hopefully short) pause in that part of the project. Get well Sam! Meanwhile the project has attracted a bit of positive attention and a crew from TVNZ will be in town tonight, primarily to capture some shots of the helikite which will be making its maiden voyage above the town this evening. And we are nearly at the point of getting a feel for how well the data capture for the project is going as a whole. Before long it will already be time to start think

A place to keep cows, but that's not important right now (if you need help with the reference ... see here ) By Worldview999 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons In atmospheric science we're always looking to have information about the vertical structure of the atmosphere. We can deploy weather stations to measure the wind speed and direction but we're always missing what's going on in the air above us. Of course there are ways to get information from higher in the air and we'll be using one of those in this project (helikite) which we'll cover when it's operating in Rangiora but now I'd like to talk about another piece of kit that we have deployed in the town. A Ceilometer . Ceilometers are intended to measure the ceiling , which means the height of the lowest cloud. These sensors send a light pulse and measure its reflection from clouds and aerosol layers to obtain this height. Ceilometer installed near the AWS site in Rangiora. Photo by Sa

If you remember , we had some troubles with our outdoor sensors last week and one of them is still in pieces in our bench and the sledgehammer looks very tempting at this stage! I think that the rest of the units heard the message and are now behaving better . However, we're not entirely happy as a large peak in $PM_{10}$ concentrations observed on the night of the 11th of August was not captured by any of our units. Unfortunately we didn't get good weather (too warm) last week to test for another large peak in concentrations so we deployed the ODINs to their target locations last Friday and I'll be very busy looking at the data when we have the first download this coming Friday... stay tuned.

A crucial part of this project, and one that we've stressed about a lot, is the recruitment of volunteers to respond our survey and host instrumentation. After a couple of weeks of recruitment efforts we're very happy with the results so far: 14 volunteers who want to fill our survey and 13 of them are willing to host instruments in their homes. That's more than we were hoping at the beginning! However, we still need more people, particularly on the eastern part of town as well as from newer subdivisions (most volunteers reported their homes built more than 20 years ago) and with older woodburners. So, reach out to your neighbour and help us increase the participants' numbers for this project.

On Tuesday I told you about the tests of our PACMAN units before they were being deployed in our volunteers' homes. Now is the turn of ODIN (Outdoor Dust Information Node). A little bit of history ... After the first PACMAN deployments we realised that we needed to have information from the outside of the home as well as the inside so we developed a stripped down version of PACMAN focusing solely on the dust measurements. Here you can see a presentation we gave about the ODIN after the very first tests.   Now, we have six ODINs to be deployed in Rangiora but before we go ahead and distribute them across the town we need to know that they are working fine so we set all of them up at ECan's air quality station in Rangiora. For this test we're looking for indications that the units are recording all the data, that the temperature looks plausible and that the dust sensors respond to something other than temperature. In simple terms, we're looking for plots t

Good timing! Just as CONA gets underway in Rangiora, a story appears in The Press (10 th August 2015), and elsewhere, covering the latest air quality monitoring data from Environment Canterbury (ECan). The Press article states: “ Christchurch's air quality is improving but there are still too many high pollution days, monitoring data shows. The article also mentions that Rangiora has again failed to meet the National Standards that it is legally required to do so by 2016. However, understanding whether air quality is, or is not getting better is much more complicated than you might think. Being able to answer this seemingly basic question is one of the main scientific aims of CONA. To find out more check out our longer article on the topic.

The Northern Outlook is the local paper covering North Canterbury. A nice piece on page 3 and a headline banner on the top of page 1. Thanks to the folks at Fairfax Media! You can find the article here: http://fairfaxmedia.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx  (although I don't know how long they keep it up there).

With thanks to my colleagues at the NIWA Media Office we did our first project press release on Monday. You can check it out here . It was immediately picked up by Newstalk ZB and I’ve had interest from One News. This project officially exists and it’s too late to change our minds and scrap the whole idea. Our main media goal at this stage is to aid recruitment of participants to do our online survey and host instruments in the home (if you haven’t registered, just go to www.niwa.co.nz/CONA-Rangiora ). Press releases are nervous times for scientists. What generally happens next is that reporters and producers call me up and expect me to give a few sound-bites on the spot. I have to have a few key messages in mind and keep it simple. Unless it’s live I get the chance for a few do-overs if I stumble. The tricky bit is always the unanticipated question, and there always is one. With Newstalk ZB I was asked how much locals can buy the air quality sensors for. That threw me, because they ar

Here is PACMAN in its native environment One of the key pieces of hardware we're deploying in this campaign is our PACMAN ( Particles, Activity and Context Measurement Autonomous Node ) ... not this pac-man . This little unit is capable of logging air quality parameters (dust concentrations, $CO_2$, $CO$), activity information (motion, distance to closest object) and context (time, temperature) every second. We expect to use this information to estimate what drives the indoor concentrations of dust in homes. All the participants that want to have instruments in their home will have one of these units installed but before we can do that we need to test if they are working as expected. So, we set them up in a bench facing a wall for a few days and as it is normal with experimental technology, not all of them worked perfectly but most of them did so we are go for PACMAN deployment. If you're curious as to what the data looks like ... here is a link to the test results of one of

That's a trick question, I haven't told you what ODINs are! Well, ODIN stands for O utdoor D ust I nformation N ode and it is the name of our low-cost outdoor dust sensor. You may ask why not calling it "low-cost outdoor sensor" to which I would respond: for the same reason that Apple doesn't call their phones "high-cost shiny communication devices". A lot goes in a name and I believe that for a project to be successful it needs a good name. So, as strange as it sounds, we have a Norse god gathering data for us. The sensors themselves are rather simple. At the heart of the ODIN is an optical dust sensor that, together with a temperature and relative humidity sensor and a clock send data to a microcontroller which saves it on a micro-SD card. The ODIN is battery operated and it can run unattended for two months on a full 6Ah LiPo battery. Simplified schematics of ODIN (left) and an actual ODIN (right) with its internal components visible. A more in depth

Great, you found us! In this case us  is the Urban Air Quality and Health group from the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere in New Zealand (NIWA) and our objective with this platform is to document and share the development of our CONA  project that started in August 2015 in Rangiora (New Zealand). Have a look at the what is CONA   page for more details about this project and maybe to register your interest in participating. In the coming weeks, expect to see here comments and stories about how things go in this project, from " look at these great looking data!  " to " I swear that if it didn't cost $20000 I'd throw this thing out the window right now!"  Because every research project has a lot more "that's weird" and "but it worked before!" moments than what you'd guess from the pretty plots we generate in the end. And also because a big part of this project is to work closer with the resident community and for that we ne