CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

Our excellent in-house videographer at NIWA, Stu Mackay, has put together this excellent short video. This material was all shot on the launch day of the project at Alexandra Primary School on 23rd May this year. What's In Your Air, Alex? from NIWA on Vimeo .

CONA just reached another milestone. On Friday children from Alexandra Primary School took home the first of our next generation of PACMAN air quality monitors that they helped to build. Children from Alexandra Primary School build their PACMAN indoor air quality monitors, helped by PACMAN's designer, Gustavo Olivares  Over the last few years we have been trying to make the PACMAN's component parts easier to assemble (and harder to get wrong). One easy way to check our progress is to ask a class of 9 to 11 years olds to see if they can build them. Back in May we tried that, albeit under a degree of time pressure. However, after only half an hour or so they had got about three-quarters of the way there. We brought the nearly-completed monitors back to the office and finished them off. Last week we sent them back to school. After a quick video hook-up to remind the children of their instructions, 11 children used our online management form to book a unit out and take it home. At...

As part of our sub-project "What's In Your Air, Alex", we have started producing weekly weather forecasts especially for the CONA study town of Alexandra, specifically aimed at our junior scientists at Alexandra Primary School. Take a look! Click this link to see an example forecast:  https://vimeo.com/album/5177939 The forecasts are presented by Maria Augutis, based in NIWA's Auckland office. Maria came down to Alexandra a few weeks ago to talk to year 5 and 6 about how we create weather forecasts. Now we are delivering weekly forecasts into the classroom using a weblink, with videos also accessible through our project app (more on that in a future post). In the meantime, we're asking the children to make their own weather observations to check up on how Maria is doing - or more precisely to understand first-hand how the very local weather we experience can deviate from the more regional scale that we can forecast. Finally we are helping them to record conditions...

Just got back from our project launch day at Alexandra Primary School. And what great fun we had. The wonderful staff there basically let us take over the whole day for year 5 and 6 (children aged 9 to 11). We had 8 activities for them around the themes of air quality and weather.  The NIWA team introduce the project to yrs 5 and 6 at Alexandra Primary School. Credit: Stu Mackay, NIWA But more than just fun and games, the activities and the whole project do have a greater purpose. This project was driven by the concept of 'Citizen Science' - that the practice of science need not be remote and inaccessible to the public. Anyone who spends time amongst younger children knows that they are all natural born scientists - curious experimenters. At some point in their later childhood, though, some start to find science more difficult and that initial excitement and wonder seems to fade away. It is in late childhood that many children often decide that science isn't for them. Thro...

This week we at the CONA team at NIWA achieved a small but very significant milestone. Real-time data has started coming in from our first wirelessly networked ODINs. Until now the ODINs have stored all of their data onto an onboard SD card which was manually downloaded by a technician. Clearly, this introduced a delay between the data been recorded and us getting our hands on it (and subsequently making charts or maps. This delay could be months in some cases. Although it has been technically possible to telemeter the data wirelessly, we opted to concentrate on proving the value of the ODIN data first, before implementing this. By the end of last year we were totally convinced that the ODIN data was valid and highly valuable, so over the summer ODIN's creator Gustavo re-designed the ODIN for remote data download, using a mobile phone modem in each device. This increased the power demands of the ODIN so it also required a larger battery and solar panel. However, after some tests in...

In winter 2018 the NIWA Air Quality and Weather Forecasting teams will be joining forces with children and staff at Alexandra School in Otago in a project called "What's In Your Air, Alex?" This will give children and staff a chance to participate in a piece of genuine scientific research which will help us understand the air quality problem in Alexandra in much more detail. This opportunity has arisen because NIWA scientists have chosen Alexandra as the next town to trial the "ODIN" - a low-cost air quality monitor that can be installed in large numbers around the town. These devices feed data to NIWA where it is combined and turned into animated maps of air quality, which can be combined with the weather forecast. ODINs (left) form a network of sensors (centre) collecting data that can be turned into animated maps (right)  At Alexandra School, we're giving children the chance to participate in this project in four ways: Make measurements of air quality and...

Didn't winter come around again fast! Seems like only yesterday we were packing up our gear in Rangiora as summer approached. But now snow is falling across South Island and its time to get the CONA gear out again. And this winter is going to be a big one for us. As usual in summer, the blog might have gone quiet, but there's been a lot happening behind the scenes, which we'll try to cover over several posts. But the headline news is that there will be three CONA studies this winter. Alexandra, in central Otago - will it be the first town to get a 100-ODIN network? Firstly, we will be hitting the little town of Alexandra, Otago in a big way. In a few weeks we will start deploying a new network of ODIN sensors - measuring particles in the outdoor air - across this town which, despite its small size, is regularly one of the most polluted in Australasia (based on regulatory PM10 data). Whereas we deployed a maximum of 18 sensors in Rangiora over the last 3 years, in Alexandra ...