Presented by: Gayle Hagler, US EPA Office of Research and Development, Andrea Clements, US EPA Office of Research and Development, Ryan Brown, US EPA Region 4, & Ron Evans, US EPA Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards

Description: Air sensor use has grown in multiple sectors in the United States, including use by air agencies (federal, state, local, tribal) for a variety of non-regulatory supplemental and informational monitoring purposes. Realizing the full benefit of this new technology, however, is limited by the extent to which the data can be attained, processed, and analyzed by the user. To understand this particular end user sector, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development led unstructured and open-ended interviews in late 2019 with 19 government air organizations to understand their current practices, unmet needs, and future outlook for using air sensor data. Based on the dialogues, the organizations were grouped by type (e.g., state vs. local air agency) and three identified levels of use: Level 1) limited use (e.g., educational demonstrations); Level 2) Growing use in temporary monitoring, data quality evaluation; and Level 3) Sensors are routinely integrated into meeting the organization’s goal. We found that organizational type was not a good predictor of their level. After this dialogue stage, a cross-EPA team evaluated the landscape of existing and in-development solutions to the identified unmet needs, focusing on Level 2 users who faced the greatest barriers to progression in their use of air sensor data. The unmet needs we targeted for this study include data hosting, data quality, code sharing, and data analytics tools. This presentation will cover the interview findings, assessment of solutions, and gaps that remain.

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