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Wireless distributed environmental sensor networks for air pollution measurement-the promise and the current reality
Broday, David M. Arpaci, Alexander Bartonova, Alena Castell-Balaguer, Nuría Cole-Hunter, Tom Dauge, Franck R. Fishbain, Barak Jones, Rod L. Galea, Karen Jovasevic-Stojanovic, Milena
Broday, David M.
Arpaci, Alexander
Bartonova, Alena
Castell-Balaguer, Nuría
Cole-Hunter, Tom
Dauge, Franck R.
Fishbain, Barak
Jones, Rod L.
Galea, Karen
Jovasevic-Stojanovic, Milena
Abstract
The evaluation of the effects of air pollution on public health and human-wellbeing requires reliable data. Standard air quality monitoring stations provide accurate measurements of airborne pollutant levels, but, due to their sparse distribution, they cannot capture accurately the spatial variability of air pollutant concentrations within cities. Dedicated in-depth field campaigns have dense spatial coverage of the measurements but are held for relatively short time periods. Hence, their representativeness is limited. Moreover, the oftentimes integrated measurements represent time-averaged records. Recent advances in communication and sensor technologies enable the deployment of dense grids of Wireless Distributed Environmental Sensor Networks for air quality monitoring, yet their capability to capture urban-scale spatiotemporal pollutant patterns has not been thoroughly examined to date. Here, we summarize our studies on the practicalities of using data streams from sensor nodes for air quality measurement and the required methods to tune the results to different stakeholders and applications. We summarize the results from eight cities across Europe, five sensor technologies-three stationary (with one tested also while moving) and two personal sensor platforms, and eight ambient pollutants. Overall, few sensors showed an exceptional and consistent performance, which can shed light on the fine spatiotemporal urban variability of pollutant concentrations. Stationary sensor nodes were more reliable than personal nodes. In general, the sensor measurements tend to suffer from the interference of various environmental factors and require frequent calibrations. This calls for the development of suitable field calibration procedures, and several such in situ field calibrations are presented.
Keywords
Date
2017
Type
Journal article
Journal
Sensors
Book
Volume
17
Issue
10
Page Range
1-17
Article Number
ACU Department
Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research
Faculty of Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
Open access
License
CC BY 4.0
File Access
Open