The ODINs are back - and so is the smoke!
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.
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 one day of bad air quality.
From a science point of view this has given us a brilliant opportunity to check that the ODINs are still operating as well as they did last year. They were all at the ECan site last Sunday and should all have responded in the same way at the same time to the high levels of smoke. We will find out next week when we download the data.
If Rangiora's PM10 levels exceed 50 again the town will have breached the standard, to use the technical term. And the ODINs will be there to observe it in detail.
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.
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| 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 one day of bad air quality.
From a science point of view this has given us a brilliant opportunity to check that the ODINs are still operating as well as they did last year. They were all at the ECan site last Sunday and should all have responded in the same way at the same time to the high levels of smoke. We will find out next week when we download the data.
If Rangiora's PM10 levels exceed 50 again the town will have breached the standard, to use the technical term. And the ODINs will be there to observe it in detail.
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