AQUAMARINE

Join us in monitoring Air Pollution for a free Air Quality Data Network

The effects of air pollution on public health are pushing the boundaries and thus demand for a rapid and sustainable solution. While certain parameters on the status of the atmosphere can indeed be picked up from Earth orbiting satellites, certain other parameters require in-situ measurement. Aerosol content in Air, for example, fall in the second category. Indeed the uncertainty associated with the aerosol contribution is known to be unacceptably large, and must be reduced by at least a factor of 3, or the accuracy of Aerosol content measurement needs to be improved to 100 parts per million. Very high spatial resolution (< 100 m) is also needed to characterize the Urban Climate in a city, currently impossible from a satellite. The accurate data needs to be provided to the citizens especially individuals with respiratory problems, so that they can plan their daily activities. However, the number of air quality monitoring stations within European cities today remain low due to the cost of establishing and maintaining these stations. In urban cities like in Berlin for example 16 air monitoring stations are established. However neither is this adequate, nor is the data openly accessible for the people. Our project thus have multiple goals - besides monitoring air quality, carbon dioxide (CO2), toxic chemical pollutants, volatile organic compounds (VOC), Aerosol Content including Dust and Radioactive Material, project AQUAMARINE will increase the knowledge about the air we breath by making the data openly accessible to everyone. The product is a distributed geo-tagged sensor cluster, partially mobile and partially static, connected by a disruption tolerant network, connected to a cloud service to provide real-time maps, graphs, and other analysis reports, accessible by a Web Coverage Service (WCS) that we develop on our own, open to both private citizens and weather forecasters. The network will scale horizontally, easily adding tens of thousands of node (Sensor and Transmitter)-s to the network, and vertically so that a node can be of appropriate size. Some nodes will be small enough to mount it on a bike. Any device, including cell phone or a tablet with limited resource, will be able to access the WCS. Efficiency of implementation and management of the consortium is of major relevance. We also hope to create large interest within the scientific community with these open air quality data. Construction of a Distributed Sensor Network for Air Quality Monitoring that compliments Aeronet by providing very high spatial and temporal resolution of Air Quality data with openly available results. At the wake of the rapidly changing climate, myriads of problems are arising. These problems are, in the one hand, relevant in a global scope. On the other hand, future geopolitical relevance of every single community will depend on how they respond to the threat. The problems that need addressing can be broadly classified in three broad classes as follows : 1. Direct effects of the constituents of air on health, agriculture, and such 2. Effect of constituents of air on the dynamics of Climate Change 3. Feedback between the above two. It therefore goes without saying, that a robust air quality monitoring network is a key of any future solution.