CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

In air quality lingo  we normally refer to small areas of increased pollutant concentrations as hot spots  but since this story is about the temperature  field I needed to use something else ... warm spots  will do. As part of the measurement campaign we deployed in Rangiora we not only used ODINs but also four weather stations (like the one on the picture) scattered around the town to explore small scale wind flows and how uniform or otherwise the temperature field is in the area. Before we dive too deep in the analysis, let's pause and look at the two kind of temperature sensors used here. First is the meteorological sites that have thoroughly calibrated and well housed thermometers, protected from the sunshine while the ODIN thermometers were ... well ... not perfectly housed (see image of the inside of an ODIN) and then put in plain sunlight attached to lamp posts (see image of ODIN attached to a lamp post). Now, don't despair! There is a reason why the ODIN tem...

If you remember , we had some troubles with our outdoor sensors last week and one of them is still in pieces in our bench and the sledgehammer looks very tempting at this stage! I think that the rest of the units heard the message and are now behaving better . However, we're not entirely happy as a large peak in $PM_{10}$ concentrations observed on the night of the 11th of August was not captured by any of our units. Unfortunately we didn't get good weather (too warm) last week to test for another large peak in concentrations so we deployed the ODINs to their target locations last Friday and I'll be very busy looking at the data when we have the first download this coming Friday... stay tuned.

A crucial part of this project, and one that we've stressed about a lot, is the recruitment of volunteers to respond our survey and host instrumentation. After a couple of weeks of recruitment efforts we're very happy with the results so far: 14 volunteers who want to fill our survey and 13 of them are willing to host instruments in their homes. That's more than we were hoping at the beginning! However, we still need more people, particularly on the eastern part of town as well as from newer subdivisions (most volunteers reported their homes built more than 20 years ago) and with older woodburners. So, reach out to your neighbour and help us increase the participants' numbers for this project.

With thanks to my colleagues at the NIWA Media Office we did our first project press release on Monday. You can check it out here . It was immediately picked up by Newstalk ZB and I’ve had interest from One News. This project officially exists and it’s too late to change our minds and scrap the whole idea. Our main media goal at this stage is to aid recruitment of participants to do our online survey and host instruments in the home (if you haven’t registered, just go to www.niwa.co.nz/CONA-Rangiora ). Press releases are nervous times for scientists. What generally happens next is that reporters and producers call me up and expect me to give a few sound-bites on the spot. I have to have a few key messages in mind and keep it simple. Unless it’s live I get the chance for a few do-overs if I stumble. The tricky bit is always the unanticipated question, and there always is one. With Newstalk ZB I was asked how much locals can buy the air quality sensors for. That threw me, because they ar...

Great, you found us! In this case us  is the Urban Air Quality and Health group from the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere in New Zealand (NIWA) and our objective with this platform is to document and share the development of our CONA  project that started in August 2015 in Rangiora (New Zealand). Have a look at the what is CONA   page for more details about this project and maybe to register your interest in participating. In the coming weeks, expect to see here comments and stories about how things go in this project, from " look at these great looking data!  " to " I swear that if it didn't cost $20000 I'd throw this thing out the window right now!"  Because every research project has a lot more "that's weird" and "but it worked before!" moments than what you'd guess from the pretty plots we generate in the end. And also because a big part of this project is to work closer with the resident community and for that we ne...