AQEarth: Custom Community Air Quality Monitoring

AQEarth: three years, two countries, five communities, and multiple new air quality monitoring technologies! To catch everyone up, the AQEarth project aimed to work collaboratively with communities to help meet the air monitoring needs of five very different locations. The project offered each location a year of local air monitoring (mobile and fixed-site equipment) combined with a range of supporting services including monitoring network design and installation support, and educational and public outreach efforts.

The program deployed in three U.S. communities (Fort Collins, Colorado; Anchorage, Alaska; Atlanta, Georgia), one Tribal area (TriChapters Region, Navajo Nation), and one international city (Mexico City, Mexico). Our amazing partners included local governments, community groups, and universities who we worked alongside to monitor local air pollution using three novel measurement technologies:

Teachers in Fort Collins, CO learning to use handheld sensors

1. The Personal Air Monitor (PAM) allows individuals (e.g., students and other community members) to measure air pollutants like CO, CO₂, total volatile organic compounds (tVOCs), NO₂, and particulate matter (PM_2.5) along sidewalks, schools, workplaces, and inside vehicles like cars and buses.
2. The AQLite monitor can measure various pollutants, such as CO, PM_2.5, O₃, tVOCs, and NO₂,  along with CO₂, the primary tracer of combustion and the most significant greenhouse gas.
3. AQSync is a reference quality monitoring station containing highly accurate miniaturized instruments that measure CO, PM₁, _2.5, ₁₀, O₃, NO₂, NO, CO₂, tVOCs, and meteorological parameters.

AQEarth was a flexible program and aimed to fully understand the interest and needs of participating organizations, helping prioritize what support and data was the most valuable to each community. So what did our partner communities choose to do?

Fort Collins, Colorado: Air monitoring and outreach focused on youth education and schools. Three AQSyncs were placed at partnering schools, and 10 mobile monitors were attached to school buses. In addition to the network, AQEarth and our partners at the City of Fort Collins worked with local teachers to implement air quality education and handheld PAMs at schools around the city.

Anchorage, Alaska: The Municipality of Anchorage (MOA) partnered with the Anchorage School District and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to strategically place 11 PAMs and two AQSyncs to gather data throughout the MOA at schools and fire stations. Many of these monitors  were able to support principles of Environmental Justice, including equitable development and public planning and policy.

TriChapter Region of the Navajo Nation: To understand what and where air pollution is coming from in the region, this project used three AQSyncs and six AQLites to meet three objectives identified for exploration in the region. The first was to establish an air quality baseline to better understand local influences and background air quality in terms of PM_2.5, O₃, and tVOCs. The second objective was to understand local air pollution exposure. Who is exposed to pollution? What pollution are they exposed to? And finally, the project aimed to investigate the spatial distribution patterns of measured pollutants across the area to characterize air quality by space and time.

Members of the AQEarth Atlanta team using mobile PAMs to measure hyper-local areas of their community.

Atlanta, Georgia: In Atlanta, the AQEarth team included Community Health Aligning Revitalization Resilience & Sustainability (CHARRS) and West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA), two organizations working on environmental justice and public health issues in the region. The project consisted of both air monitoring and community education that collectively aim to bring community members together around air quality issues in West Atlanta neighborhoods, with hands-on workshops and environmental justice bus tours with stops at both industrial facilities and culturally important sites, as well as an AQSync installed at a fire station near where many industrial air pollution sources are in close proximity to residents and community.

Mexico City, Mexico: The team in Mexico City was composed of researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Their goals were to better understand exposure to air pollution in a Metrobus station in Mexico City, and the team designed custom stations using an AQSync and 16 PAMs placed in locations that allowed them to understand pollution fields across space within the station.

AQEarth was a steller three-year project for our team, with countless learnings and discoveries made. This was a collaborative project between 2B Technologies, TD Environmental Services, Montrose Environmental Group, and the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, a team that we are very grateful for. Looking forward to the next AQEarth!

AQEarth was funded by the National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program that seeks to spur new products and services while contributing to greater improvements in public health.