CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

A place to keep cows, but that's not important right now (if you need help with the reference ... see here ) By Worldview999 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons In atmospheric science we're always looking to have information about the vertical structure of the atmosphere. We can deploy weather stations to measure the wind speed and direction but we're always missing what's going on in the air above us. Of course there are ways to get information from higher in the air and we'll be using one of those in this project (helikite) which we'll cover when it's operating in Rangiora but now I'd like to talk about another piece of kit that we have deployed in the town. A Ceilometer . Ceilometers are intended to measure the ceiling , which means the height of the lowest cloud. These sensors send a light pulse and measure its reflection from clouds and aerosol layers to obtain this height. Ceilometer installed near the AWS site in Rangiora. Photo by Sa...

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.

On Tuesday I told you about the tests of our PACMAN units before they were being deployed in our volunteers' homes. Now is the turn of ODIN (Outdoor Dust Information Node). A little bit of history ... After the first PACMAN deployments we realised that we needed to have information from the outside of the home as well as the inside so we developed a stripped down version of PACMAN focusing solely on the dust measurements. Here you can see a presentation we gave about the ODIN after the very first tests.   Now, we have six ODINs to be deployed in Rangiora but before we go ahead and distribute them across the town we need to know that they are working fine so we set all of them up at ECan's air quality station in Rangiora. For this test we're looking for indications that the units are recording all the data, that the temperature looks plausible and that the dust sensors respond to something other than temperature. In simple terms, we're looking for plots t...

Here is PACMAN in its native environment One of the key pieces of hardware we're deploying in this campaign is our PACMAN ( Particles, Activity and Context Measurement Autonomous Node ) ... not this pac-man . This little unit is capable of logging air quality parameters (dust concentrations, $CO_2$, $CO$), activity information (motion, distance to closest object) and context (time, temperature) every second. We expect to use this information to estimate what drives the indoor concentrations of dust in homes. All the participants that want to have instruments in their home will have one of these units installed but before we can do that we need to test if they are working as expected. So, we set them up in a bench facing a wall for a few days and as it is normal with experimental technology, not all of them worked perfectly but most of them did so we are go for PACMAN deployment. If you're curious as to what the data looks like ... here is a link to the test results of one of...