CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

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...

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...