Providing Ambient Air Pollution Monitoring Solutions For:

Research

Assessment of air monitoring networks in rural regions is a difficult task due to the small number permanent air quality stations available and therefore large uncertainty exists as to whether those regions are meeting air quality standards. Recent advancements in remote sensing has made available additional data to assist in these evaluations, however there is still a need to “ground truth” the remote sensing data.

American Ecotech was asked by researchers to develop mobile platform for one such project where the system would be deployed in locations where remote sensing data identified high levels of criteria pollutants.   Requirements for the project included that the system be easy and quick to deploy, integrate several different types of instruments, and provide a centralized data acquisition system to remotely monitor station performance. AE developed a trailer to house both the air quality and meteorological instrumentation. The system was complete with climate control, a pneumatic mast to mount the meteorological instrumentation, and shock mounted racks for the air quality instrumentation which included ozone, PM10 and PM2.5 continuous monitors, nephelometers, and black carbon analyzer.  The system was tied together through a data acquisition system which includes a station data logger and remote retrieval software for downloading, evaluating, and reporting the data collected.