CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

After their spectacular success last year our fleet of low-cost particulate sensors - the Outdoor Dust Information Node or ODIN - are back in Rangiora. An initial fleet of 13 have been installed at Environment Canterbury's monitoring site in the centre of town and will remain there until next week. After that they will be distributed to different locations around the town. ODINs under test at the ECan monitoring site in Rangiora And not a moment too soon. Last Sunday (11th June) saw Rangiora's first exceedence of the National Environmental Standard for PM10 of the year. This means that the level of PM10 (airborne particles smaller than 10 microns or small enough to enter the lungs), averaged over 24 hours (midnight to midnight) exceeded 50 micrograms per cubic metre. The rules (part of the Resource Management Act) state that Rangiora, like many other towns, were not allowed to have more than one exceedence per year from 1st September 2016. So Rangiora has now had its permitted ...

We like to think of CONA as doing something pretty unique and ground-breaking. There are a several research projects around the world looking at new low-cost air quality sensors and how they can be used to enable citizens to become scientists. But there are very few, if any, looking at this in the context of smaller towns and the problem of woodsmoke from home heating. But there are a small number of researchers around the world interested in these issues. Last year we at NIWA managed to convince the NZ government that this was an area of research in which New Zealand can play a major global role. We were able to get funding from the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment to set up an International Woodsmoke Researchers' Network . The Network was launched in July 2016 with a mixture of public and invitation-only meetings in Wellington. We were able to bring 8 international experts over representing the US, Canada, Sweden, Finland, the UK and Australia. Later in the week t...