ODINs popping up everywhere!
COVID-19 lockdown threw up many challenges. Our project team were generally in a good place - NIWA made it quite clear early on that our jobs were secure. But our plans for a project based on community interaction were in disarray.
We were so close! Our big innovation for 2020 - the CONA project's sixth year - was recruiting community volunteers to help install and manage the ODIN fleet. I'd done the recruitment workshop and the training session and first deployments in Arrowtown were all planned - venue booked, flights booked, Air BnB booked - for Sunday 29th March. Which turned out to be day 4 of level-4 lockdown.
Now our ODIN fleet, like us, was stuck in Auckland just as the home heating season got started.
After a lot of discussions and mind-clearing local walks (2 metre distancing rules strictly followed) it became clear that the one thing we could do - once we moved to level-3 at least - was ask NIWA technicians based at our atmospheric observatory at Lauder in Central Otago, to go and do the installation for us. By the time they were trained, ready, and in possession of 70 new ODINs we were transitioning to level-2, which also made it much easier - two technicians could travel in the same car, for instance, instead of having to travel separately.
Over 4 days, nearly 70 ODINs were installed across Arrowtown, beating our previous record of 48 at the end of winter 2019. This is an admittedly ridiculous number for such a small town! But it's also quite deliberate. In fact, the ODINs are not evenly distributed across town like in 2019. Rather, this year they are mainly concentrated in the southern two-thirds of the town (south of Kent Street and Boundary Street). In this area the average distance between ODINs is about 100 metres. By deploying ODINs at this high density we are not only able to investigate the spatial patterns of air quality in super-fine detail, but also determine what is the optimum density for such a network. We also aim to determine whether the extra density enables the network to identify what we call "gross emitters", that is chimneys that are emitting much more smoke than others - either temporarily or regularly.
The ODINs are attempting to send data to the cloud via the 5G network. This is not totally reliable at the moment. Some ODINs are suffering from poor mobile signal, whilst others seem to be struggling to keep their batteries fully charged on the long dark nights, especially those deeper in the valley. This should improve as days start to get longer. However, all ODINs should be storing all their data to their onboard SD card which we will retrieve later in the winter.
The data we do receive is automatically rendered into an animated contour map every morning, and posted to our website.
https://niwa.co.nz/atmosphere/research-projects/air-quality-issues-in-new-zealand-towns-2020-results
If you follow this link you will discover that we now have ODIN networks in Masterton and Invercargill too. These networks are sparser, using only 24 ODINs to cover larger towns. These projects are possible due to co-funding from Greater Wellington Regional Council and MBIE (Unlocking Curious Minds) respectively. These project allowed us to trial enabling Council staff to install ODINs on their own. The next step is to revive our plan to enable community volunteers to do the same. Although we've missed the opportunity to do this in Arrowtown this year, we still plan to trial this somewhere later in 2020 and again in 2021.
Now that the ODINs are sorted, time to try and make up for lost time on the rest of the project....
We were so close! Our big innovation for 2020 - the CONA project's sixth year - was recruiting community volunteers to help install and manage the ODIN fleet. I'd done the recruitment workshop and the training session and first deployments in Arrowtown were all planned - venue booked, flights booked, Air BnB booked - for Sunday 29th March. Which turned out to be day 4 of level-4 lockdown.
Now our ODIN fleet, like us, was stuck in Auckland just as the home heating season got started.
After a lot of discussions and mind-clearing local walks (2 metre distancing rules strictly followed) it became clear that the one thing we could do - once we moved to level-3 at least - was ask NIWA technicians based at our atmospheric observatory at Lauder in Central Otago, to go and do the installation for us. By the time they were trained, ready, and in possession of 70 new ODINs we were transitioning to level-2, which also made it much easier - two technicians could travel in the same car, for instance, instead of having to travel separately.
Over 4 days, nearly 70 ODINs were installed across Arrowtown, beating our previous record of 48 at the end of winter 2019. This is an admittedly ridiculous number for such a small town! But it's also quite deliberate. In fact, the ODINs are not evenly distributed across town like in 2019. Rather, this year they are mainly concentrated in the southern two-thirds of the town (south of Kent Street and Boundary Street). In this area the average distance between ODINs is about 100 metres. By deploying ODINs at this high density we are not only able to investigate the spatial patterns of air quality in super-fine detail, but also determine what is the optimum density for such a network. We also aim to determine whether the extra density enables the network to identify what we call "gross emitters", that is chimneys that are emitting much more smoke than others - either temporarily or regularly.
The ODINs are attempting to send data to the cloud via the 5G network. This is not totally reliable at the moment. Some ODINs are suffering from poor mobile signal, whilst others seem to be struggling to keep their batteries fully charged on the long dark nights, especially those deeper in the valley. This should improve as days start to get longer. However, all ODINs should be storing all their data to their onboard SD card which we will retrieve later in the winter.
The data we do receive is automatically rendered into an animated contour map every morning, and posted to our website.
https://niwa.co.nz/atmosphere/research-projects/air-quality-issues-in-new-zealand-towns-2020-results
If you follow this link you will discover that we now have ODIN networks in Masterton and Invercargill too. These networks are sparser, using only 24 ODINs to cover larger towns. These projects are possible due to co-funding from Greater Wellington Regional Council and MBIE (Unlocking Curious Minds) respectively. These project allowed us to trial enabling Council staff to install ODINs on their own. The next step is to revive our plan to enable community volunteers to do the same. Although we've missed the opportunity to do this in Arrowtown this year, we still plan to trial this somewhere later in 2020 and again in 2021.
Now that the ODINs are sorted, time to try and make up for lost time on the rest of the project....
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