CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

As a part of Unlocking Curious Minds project , NIWA scientists spent their day at Arrowtown School with Year 8 students performing air quality experiments and learning about connections between air quality, weather and health in Arrowtown, New Zealand and around the world.  Students observed particles in the air, measured air quality and weather and found out about their own lung capacity. Highlight of the day for students One of the things they learned was about how the cilia in our lungs help us breathe easily by keeping the particles out (to be honest though, they practiced the art of throwing paper balls at their teachers, while teachers failed miserably to defend themselves!!) - as is obvious from their facial expressions, they loved it.. Highlight of the day for scientists and teachers: All the little activities during the day and 5-minute discussions around them triggered a huge variety of questions in their creative minds, some of them below: D...

Stories like this have been appearing in the press around the world recently: http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/80075184/timarus-air-pollution-the-worst-in-oceania-figures-reveal This has been triggered by the release of a global air quality database by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The data they have used (in the case of Timaru) actually comes from Environment Canterbury (ECan) and specifically the continuous monitoring site they operate in the town. It's just the same as the ECan site in the centre of our CONA pilot study town of Rangiora. Press in other countries have basically done the same thing - looked through the database to find the worst or most surprising results in their local area and done some international comparison. I'm sure many readers abroad have come across the NZ figures and gone "Timaru? Never heard of it!" Well they have now. But is this 'notoriety' justified? I've already responded to several enquiries asking me if...

The 2015 CONA first pilot study in Rangiora is over. But CONA is back! The second pilot study, also in Rangiora, is about to get underway. The blog may have been quiet over the last 6 months, but we've ben beavering away, making sense of the mountain of data we collected. We've just released data to our 15 volunteer participants, telling them what we measured in their homes and found out about their woodburner use and indoor air quality. We've just put out a press release: https://www.niwa.co.nz/news/air-quality-scientists-look-for-smoke-signals  and are putting the finishing touches to a technical report. In brief we were very happy with the results of the pilot study. We found that our new technology sensors, the PACMAN for indoors and ODIN for outdoors, were not totally reliable, but when they worked they worked really well. Using an online survey to recruit participants and get them to report their perceptions of air quality was very easy and fairly reliable. Using smal...

Good timing! Just as CONA gets underway in Rangiora, a story appears in The Press (10 th August 2015), and elsewhere, covering the latest air quality monitoring data from Environment Canterbury (ECan). The Press article states: “ Christchurch's air quality is improving but there are still too many high pollution days, monitoring data shows. The article also mentions that Rangiora has again failed to meet the National Standards that it is legally required to do so by 2016. However, understanding whether air quality is, or is not getting better is much more complicated than you might think. Being able to answer this seemingly basic question is one of the main scientific aims of CONA. To find out more check out our longer article on the topic.