A citizen centred urban network for weather and air quality in Australian schools

Abstract

High-quality, standardized urban canopy layer observations are a worldwide necessity for urban climate and air quality research and monitoring. The Schools Weather and Air Quality (SWAQ) network was developed and distributed across the Greater Sydney region with a view to establish a citizen-centred network for investigation of the intra-urban heterogeneity and inter-parameter dependency of all major urban climate and air quality metrics. The network comprises a matrix of eleven automatic weather stations, nested with a web of six automatic air quality stations, stretched across 2779 km2, with average spacing of 10.2 km. Six meteorological parameters and six air pollutants are recorded. The network has a focus on Sydney’s western suburbs of rapid urbanization, but also extends to many eastern coastal sites where there are gaps in existing regulatory networks. Observations and metadata are available from September 2019 and undergo routine quality control, quality assurance and publication. Metadata, original datasets and quality-controlled datasets are open-source and available for extended academic and non-academic use.

Citizen Science for One Digital Health: A Rapid Qualitative Review of Studies in Air Quality with Reflections on a Conceptual Model

“…There was an active public participatory focus in most studies, as guided by researchers towards testing air quality sensors, or in sampling and recording air quality using portable low-tech sensors to determine pollutant levels in neighbourhoods or urban centres. In some cases, there was more passive participation, in terms of hosting monitoring devices outside or inside the home, e.g., CAPTOR (Schaefer et al 2020) and SWAQ (Ulpiani et al 2022).…”

“…Apps used by volunteers to crowdsource localised air quality indicators provided data in some studies (Hsu et al 2020). Monitoring stations were the main data capture and recording instruments in other investigations (Ulpiani et al 2022;Schaefer et al 2020). Some civicfunded initiatives used a combination of official monitoring stations and public-contributed data to support street level and personalised health monitoring needs, such as PRAISE-HK, which used fine-scale monitoring algorithms to detect air quality in outdoor and indoor settings, and on different modes of transport (Che et al 2020).…”

“…Children and youth were commonly involved in environmental behaviour change studies and were activated through environmental literacy acquisition and/ or environmental justice scenarios (Johnston et al 2019;Rohlman et al 2019;Kim and Sohanchyk 2022). The SWAQ program involved school students in collecting and analysing sensor data for use in science and geography curriculum-aligned classroom activities (Ulpiani et al 2022). Children participating in the Greater London air quality monitoring project attended education sessions and focus groups with their parents, providing opportunities for collective learning, agency, and adoption of health positive behaviours (Varaden et al 2021).…”

SchoolAIR: A Citizen Science IoT Framework Using Low-Cost Sensing for Indoor Air Quality Management

“…Personal air monitors and a smartphone app were developed specifically to monitor both indoor and outdoor air in school contexts, covering 95 schools across the United States of America. Ulpiani et al [ 34 ] describe a CS project involving Australian schools—The Schools Weather and Air Quality (SWAQ) network—aiming to study the role of urbanization on outdoor environmental quality. This network collects data regarding the concentration of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and .…”

“…Ulpiani et al [ 34 ] describe a CS project involving Australian schools—The Schools Weather and Air Quality (SWAQ) network—aiming to study the role of urbanization on outdoor environmental quality. This network collects data regarding the concentration of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and .…”