In Situ air pollution data sources
There is a wide range of free and commercial sources for ground-based, real-time air quality measurements. This page provides an overview of platforms considered as potential data ingestion pipelines for vAirify.
From their website:
OpenAQ is a nonprofit organization providing universal access to air quality data to empower a global community of changemakers to solve air inequality—the unequal access to clean air.
All code is open-source and on GitHub in the OpenAQ Platform repo.
This section lists the key criteria for air quality data aggregated onto the platform and is straight from their GH repo. A full explanation can be accessed here.
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Data must be of one of these pollutant types: PM10, PM2.5, sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), and black carbon (BC).
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Data must be from an official-level outdoor air quality source, as defined as data produced by a government entity or international organization. We do not, at this stage, include data from low-cost, temporary, and/or indoor sensors.
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Data must be ‘raw’ and reported in physical concentrations on their originating site. Data cannot be shared in an 'Air Quality Index' or equivalent (e.g. AQI, PSI, API) format.
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Data must be at the ‘station-level,’ associable with geographic coordinates, not aggregated into a higher (e.g. city) level.
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Data must be from measurements averaged between 10 minutes and 24 hours.
- data can be accessed by geographical location + search radius (max of 25 km)
- historical data for custom time periods available
- REST API allows up to 300 requests per 5 minute window or about one request per second
- full API documentation API here
From their website:
The World Air Quality Index project is a non-profit project started in 2007. Its mission is to promote air pollution awareness for citizens and provide a unified and world-wide air quality information. The project is providing transparent air quality information for more than 130 countries, covering more than 250,000 air quality monitoring stations in 2,000 major cities, via those two websites: aqicn.org and waqi.info.
Main difference to OpenAQ: inclusion of A LOT of low-cost and citizen science sensors
- data can be accessed by geographical location + bounding box
- no historical data at the moment, online "real-time"
- raw pollutant data in progress
- REST API allows up to 1000 requests per second
- full API documentation API here
Number of stations: 11,000+ (OpenAQ) vs. 250,000 (AQICN)
