Carbon dioxide gets a lot of press as a human-generated atmospheric pollutant, but while we have not yet even doubled its concentration in the atmosphere over the past three hundred years of industrial activity we have managed close to a hundred-fold increase in sulfur dioxide during this same period. Some sulfur dioxide gets produced deliberately…
Continue Reading "Burning brimstone: the why and how of measuring sulfur dioxide" »
One of the great utilities of the Safecast project is the ability to collect and analyze environmental data on an unprecedented scale. As Safecast passes the two year mark with collecting radiation data in Japan it is now possible to begin to look back over the changes in radioactivity across different parts of the country…
How do you address the question of what should be measured in the air to help determine its quality in a meaningful way? As Safecast has been expanding its efforts into monitoring air quality we’ve been sorting out what to measure based on the following criteria: public health, environmental interest, and durability of the sensors…
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As you may have recently heard, the city of Beijing recently went off the scale for established measurements of the amount of particulate matter in the air. As of the 13th of January the U.S. embassy, the only publicly reporting monitoring station in the city, measured a concentration of 886 micrograms per cubic meter (To give…
Continue Reading "Citizen science and air quality monitoring in Tokyo" »