CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

Donald Trump may not appreciate what the World Health Organisation has contributed to the management of this crisis, but one of the many things that it has done is co-ordinate the release of numbers. We’ve all been watching the numbers, almost in real-time, describing the rise and fall of COVID cases. But for scientists - numbers are our raw materials. For the many of us feeding on the numbers as they came in, it became clear early on that some countries were faring differently than others. Whereas kiwis eagerly looked for evidence that our early action had prevented a disaster, others quickly noticed that those places fairing worse had a number of things in common, one of which was a pre-pandemic history of poor air quality. (Follow these links to find out more: link1 , link2 , link3 ) This is not a big surprise to us with experience in air quality and health. We have long known that exposure to air pollution has two main effects on health. The first so-called ‘acute’ effe...

It's usually about this time of year that we remember that we have this blog, and resolve that we really should be using it more. But so much for "usually"! We were scheduled to re-launch fieldwork on 29th March. Not only were we ready to install 70 ODINs in Arrowtown - our densest network ever (maybe the densest air sensor network in the world?), but this time we were about to recruit our first community volunteer force to co-manage the project. As it turned out, 29th March was day 4 of New Zealand's COVID-19 "level-4" lockdown. In the run up we were getting advice not to host meetings, especially inviting members of the public to congregate with visitors (us) who had flown across the country. So now we find ourselves stuck at home in Auckland and Christchurch, unable to access, never mind us, our fleet of sensors stuck in our Auckland office. However, that doesn't mean that nothing is happening on the project. Although we got very slac...