CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

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...