EAGER: AirU: Community Network to Understand Air Quality and Sensor Reliability

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1642513 Kelly, Kerry E. This award is under NSF's topic of Public Participation in Scientific Research. The project will build on the principal investigators' (PIs) existing community partnerships, K-12 outreach program, and their network platform for low-cost air quality sensors (AirU) to engage and empower their community in understanding and addressing their city's most pressing air-quality research questions and to evaluate sensor reliability. It focuses on the Salt Lake Valley, which experiences periodic episodes of poor air quality, at times having the highest levels of particulate matter (PM) pollution in the nation. The project will bring together three communities: high-school and middle-school students who will build their own sensor package and contribute data to the network; a non-profit organization, Breathe Utah, who will develop educational curricula and bring low-cost sensors to middle schools; and a community organization, PurpleAir, which has been collecting air-quality data to understand the effects of gravel-pit operations on local air quality. The approach involves: (a) engaging the community groups to identify their most pressing air-quality research questions, (b) improving understanding of the geo-spatial and temporal resolution of air-quality metrics, (c) developing strategies to leverage citizen science in understanding sensor reliability, and (d) integrating a low-cost sensor package into the Department of Chemical Engineering's regular visits to high-schools as part of their STEM outreach efforts. The air-quality data network will continually report online air-quality parameters, including PM, NO2, and CO, and will educate the public about project progress and more broadly about local air quality with regular updates and opportunities for feedback.