The GO3 Project and AQTreks: A decade of air pollution monitoring with students and the public
Presented by: Jessa Ellenburg, 2B Technologies
Summary: Over the past decade, new and emerging technologies in air pollution instrumentation have made it possible to involve students and citizen scientists in air pollution monitoring. Similarly, advances in data communication and transmission have made it increasingly easy to share and display data. Two educational programs, the Global Ozone (GO3) Project and AQTreks, have used these advances to get air pollution monitors into the hands of thousands of students around the world and to automate data sharing. These educational projects began in 2009 with the GO3 Project, a stationary ground level ozone monitoring project. In the GO3 Project, students and teachers at more than 100 schools from around the world installed ozone and weather monitoring stations at their schools with automatic uploading of their data, resulting in more than 12 million ozone measurements. Over the years, new technologies became available for students to expand their measurements from stationary to mobile platforms. Since 2016, the AQTreks educational program has been developed concurrently with the Personal Air Monitor (PAM), a mobile sensor suite paired with a smartphone app. Complimenting the technology are online curricula and resources for students and citizens to learn about air pollution and climate change. In these projects, a focus on data quality and the careful selection of monitoring technologies have resulted in scientific use of the student-collected data, including their incorporation in several research campaigns that have furthered understanding of ground-level ozone formation. My talk will cover general information about our path and lessons learned from our air pollution monitoring programs. I will address the various benefits and disadvantages of stationary vs. mobile educational programs, including the aspects students seem to be most interested in, the scientific value of the data, etc. I will tailor my talk to the audience, focusing on the interests of those in attendance.