Deployment and testing of lower-cost ambient air quality sensor systems in urban environment (sensEURcity )

The ‘sensEURcity’ project was launched because measurements from cheaper (low cost) air quality sensors are still too unreliable and data quality is insufficiently known. With this project, the Directorate-General of the European Joint Research Centre (DG JRC), with funding from the Directorate-General for Environment, aims to help evaluate the performance and potential of low-cost sensor systems for air quality and make comparisons with conventional measurement methods. To achieve this, the sensors are used under different environmental and meteorological conditions in three European cities, Antwerp, Oslo and Zagreb. In Oslo, we enjoyed collaboration on air quality measurements with the Oslo City Environment Agency and the Public Road Administration, and a collaboration on technical infrastructure with Oslo City Bike (Oslo Bysykler).

The project is a service contract with the main aim to pilot field operation, ranging from sensor preparation for field deployment, establishment and monitoring of quality systems for field operations, for data flows and for data quality control, troubleshooting and monitoring of thereof. We have also provided supporting data from the regulatory compliance monitoring network, from existing meteorological stations, as well as air quality data generated by air quality models.

As a technical basis, the team has used the AirSensEur air quality monitoring units (https://airsenseur.org/website) with a Grafana graphical interface to the data ingestion system and database. Both the technical platform and the data communication systems are developed using open science principles and are freely available.