Tales Of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
for Clean Air & Water
Optimizing The Use Of Low Cost Air Sensors
Notable remedies for public conflicts begin with new information. New approaches lead to better answers to perennial problems.
Yet, contentious times bring all manner of outcomes when we choose a topic and line up two speakers from different entities for a public program. Legions of talks set out to dispute contradictory facts. At the end, the dispute stands where it began. Loads of talks are pep talks for one side of an issue, which offer nothing new.
Talks that help a breadth of interests are much more rare. An example is two informed speakers with different, yet overlapping, interests who proceed to assess a new tool or approach to a problem. Any new tool has new strong points and weak points. So, talks fill a need when each speaker brings in parts aimed to optimize the use of the new tool for mutual benefits.
Although rare, such talks indeed happen. You can read the results of one recent occasion at Community Environmental Working Group (CEWG): low cost air sensor option. The CEWG’s goals include more purposeful forums. On Dec. 18, 2024, the CEWG hosted two speakers by Zoom – one from the EPA’s Region 6 Office in Dallas and one innovator of low cost air sensors for community-based monitoring of outdoor air quality. The two speakers were EPA’s Suzanne Apodaca, PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering, and Adrian Dybwad, inventor and owner of PurpleAir, Inc., a world leader in community-based air monitoring.
The public event, stated by its title, focused on optimizing the use of novel sensors, as dictated by their built-in features. Valuable new tools too often fail to reach their full potential for lack of optimizing their use. “Optimizing” does not just fall into place. It has to be built on a firm foundation of pros and cons, people’s interests, and know-how. For insight, we zoom in on the process of optimizing.
The new sensors’ low cost (~$200 per unit) has different effects in different directions:
- On some scale, low cost saves money (good).
- The low cost carries with it the handicap that the sensors can test for only a few pollutants. They mainly test for particulate matter – smoke and dust – in varied size ranges (not so good).
- Low cost increases our ability to create area maps that are thicker with data about concentrations of a pollutant than are gathered from the EPA’s regulatory monitors of outdoor air quality (very good).
For decades, the EPA has maintained a secure network of regulatory monitors of outdoor air quality, which has benefits and costs of its own. These monitors reliably gather the highest quality data for all six of the most common air pollutants. But EPA’s monitors’ are handicapped by high costs to buy (upwards of $10,000 each) and operate. These costs limit their numbers, and thus the volume of data they produce and the areas covered.
If their uses are optimized, EPA’s monitors and the low cost sensors can help each other. In 2012, the EPA hosted the first large meeting on modern low cost air sensors. Attendees included early industry leaders, linked community groups, researchers, industry, and regulators.
The EPA and PurpleAir, Inc. know that the air quality data each tool produces are only as good as the methods applied in calibrating and quality control of the monitors used. The agency and the company both spend resources to make this point clear and to provide training for citizen scientists.
The CEWG figures in as a joint project of Intel in New Mexico and the environmental community. I have been a volunteer and acting chair of the group for 20 years. The project’s facilitator, Marc Kolman, is paid by Intel. Marc made dozens of phone calls to offices during the three months before December to arrange the program. Some well suited speakers had to get approvals to speak. Approvals come from entities with differing missions, a full slate, and limited resources.
These tasks are all essential for optimizing the use of low cost air sensors.