By Ian Longley When it comes to tracking the emission and dispersion of smoke there’s a lot you could learn just by watching. Are cameras a viable smoke monitoring tool? When I’ve been asked about the monitoring of smoke, I automatically think of instruments that...
By Ian Longley Outside our major centres, New Zealand is a country of many small towns separated by long drives. The harder somewhere is to get to, the more likely it is tucked away in a valley or basin, and the more likely it is to rely on wood for home heating. How...
Schools, libraries and gyms can be converted into Clean Air Refuges during bushfire smoke events. But can your home? In many cases, we think the answer is YES. Perhaps as many as 8 million Australian homes were exposed to smoke in the 2019-20 fire season, and in most...
By: Ian Longley So farewell RMA and 20 years of doing air quality management the way we do it In December 2025, the NZ government revealed its replacement for the Resource Management Act (RMA) which has governed how we manage ambient air quality for over two decades....
By: Gustavo Olivares Because of its significant cost, monitoring air quality used to only be available to government agencies. However, over the past decade, cheaper air quality sensors have made it to the market and have been used in earnest by many people, from...
By: Ian Longley EECA report: “Indoor combustion in New Zealand homes: health effects and costs” Our commentary and opinion A new report has shown how emissions from gas stoves and unflued gas heaters pose a burden on health that is comparable in size to the burden...
By: Ian Longley My first car was a 1976 Ford Escort. As a junior engineer I could lift up the bonnet and see how all the parts connected together to work in a co-ordinated system. And when it didn’t work, I had a good chance of being able to figure out what the...
By: Ian Longley Can you keep the air in your place free of viruses even when its crowded, free from chemical contamination, maintain good ventilation without exposing yourself to smoke from outside, and all without letting out the heat or raising the energy bills? ...
Dr Ian Longley, Director at The Air Quality Collective, Joins Global Commission on Healthy Indoor Air (Press Release: Global Commission on Healthy Indoor Air) New Commission announced at the United Nations unites more than 100 leaders from 30 countries to drive...
By: Ian Longley As far as I can tell the last breach of the AQNES for nitrogen dioxide happened in 2022 at Auckland coming after at least a decade of falling concentrations. It looked like maybe NO2 was yesterday’s pollutant. Then late in 2021 the World Health...
For years, the emergence of low-cost sensors has offered a potential solution for councils to maintain environmental monitoring under continual pressure to reduce budgets. But used smartly, these sensors offer a whole lot more than just cost savings. They offer the...
We’re very happy to announce we have past the milestone of one year in business. We were sad to leave NIWA (now undergoing its own transformation into Earth Sciences New Zealand) but set up our company on the week we left. In a time when budgets have been slashed,...
By: Ian Longley What if we thought about pandemics the way we think about tsunamis? My eye was caught today by an article on how effective the pan-Pacific tsunami warning system had been following this week’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the cost of Russia. An...
By: Guy Coulson We are pleased to announce that again, alongside our colleagues at the University of Canterbury, we have been awarded a Smart Idea grant (Optimizing Next-Generation Climate Model Precipitation Projections for Improved Climate Resilience) from the...
By: Ian Longley Last Thursday (24th April) the mobile phones of thousands of Aucklanders simultaneously throbbed and wailed as a civil defence emergency announcement was broadcast across the city. A huge and devastating fire had broken out at a recycling centre on the...
By: Guy Coulson We are very happy to announce that the Air Quality Collective along with our colleagues at the University of Canterbury have been awarded $415,000 by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Strategic Catalyst fund for a project called...
By: Ian Longley Portable air cleaners – by which I mean domestic appliances that use a fan to pass air over a HEPA filter and are sometimes referred to as PACs – often claim to remove 99.9% of bad stuff (viruses, smoke, dust) from the air. If that were true, why are...
The recently released IQAir report (2024 IQAir World Air Quality Report | IQAir,) has highlighted New Zealand as one of the few countries meeting WHO air quality standards. However, this paints an incomplete picture. Air pollution remains one of the greatest...
By: Ian Longley -What's the Issue? The air in your home can be contaminated from both outside and within. It may be smoke from wood-fires, rural burning, or bushfires. It might be dust or chemicals from industry, or particulates from trucks. But it could also be...
By: Ian Longley Through 2025 The Air Quality Collective is working with Otago Regional Council to find out more about the contribution of open burning to smoke in the air in the Alexandra-Clyde Basin. What’s the issue? During winter, smoke from home heating has long...
Last week, NZ Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Judith Collins announced “the largest reset of NZ Science sector in more than 30 years”, including the merging of 8 Crown Research Institutes into three “Public Research Organisations”. Yet New Zealand still...
By: Ian Longley New Zealand has some of the sweetest, purest, clearest clean air anywhere in the world. Most of the time. In most places. This is the continuing story of those other times and places. New Zealand is harbouring four guilty secrets about its air –...
As the world faces the challenge of maintaining healthy indoor environments in an era of pandemics and climate change, World Ventil8 Day 2024 is set to spotlight the critical role of ventilation in enhancing health and wellbeing. This year’s theme “Enabling Action”...
By: Ian Longley New Zealand has some of the sweetest, purest, clearest clean air anywhere in the world. Most of the time. In most places. This is the continuing story of those other times and places. New Zealand is harbouring four guilty secrets about its air –...
The Ministry for the Environment and StatsNZ released Our Air 2024, an update on the state of the air in Aotearoa/New Zealand's. This is a very important document, and we can't pass the opportunity to give our perspective on its content and what it may mean for air...
By: Ian Longley To create a map of air quality across a town or city you used to have spend significant resources setting up and maintaining a sparse air quality monitoring network and then apply uncertain models which rely on emissions data you don’t usually have....
By: Ian Longley New Zealand has some of the sweetest, purest, clearest clean air anywhere in the world. Most of the time. In most places. This is the story of those other times and places. New Zealand is harbouring four guilty secrets about its air – four...
By: Guy Coulson Current climate models misrepresent cloud formation over the Southern Ocean causing mismatches between models and satellite observations. These errors are important because too much sunlight reaches the ocean surface in simulations, leading to...
By: Ian Longley The degree to which road traffic pollutes urban air varies hugely, depending how much traffic is nearby. We’ve been mapping traffic pollution in detail across all New Zealand’s towns and cities over the last decade. In doing so we’ve been refining the...
By: Ian Longley In February 2023 floods following Cyclone Gabrielle dumped 20 million tonnes of silt across 4 productive farming valleys in New Zealand’s Hawkes Bay. As recovery operations disturbed the silt dense clouds of dust posed a new hazard that lingered for...
By: Gustavo Olivares When it became clear that New Zealand’s successful elimination strategy was to be replaced with one of mitigation, it also became clear that we needed to understand the ventilation practices in our indoor spaces. As part of the Ministry of Health...
By: Gustavo Olivares Air pollution is one of those things, like weather and climate, that because it affects everyone we all have an opinion about it. This makes it an ideal area for "citizen" and "traditional" scientists to collaborate and work towards improving our...
By: Gustavo Olivares The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the status quo in a number of ways. From helping the world realize that you can run scientific conferences that are accessible for people who cannot (or will not) travel, to rising the very thorny question of...
By: Gustavo OlivaresChasing the dream of accurate and reliable low cost sensors in air qualityFor quite a few years now, there are a number of projects around consumer level (as opposed to research grade) air quality sensors. (Air Quality Egg, Speck, Dustduino, Air...
Using solid fuel Use of solid fuel, mostly wood but also coal, particularly in some South Island towns, is a major source of night-time airborne pollution in many places in New Zealand. On cold, still winter nights dispersion is poor and emissions from domestic...
So what is air pollution? Pollution is bad. The word ‘pollution’ conjures up images of something dark, something menacing, something nasty that turns up where it shouldn’t. The notion of something clean and pure being invaded by something repulsive or distasteful that...
Many teachers know that period 3 brain fog, when the children in front of them slump their shoulders and everything seems harder. It could be stale air. Without good ventilation contaminants can build up, including other people’s breath. And that breath could contain...
By: Ian Longley WestConnex: Using monitoring data to understand the impact of new road tunnels on local air quality Major road tunnels are designed to meet consent conditions that minimize their impact on local air quality. But how can communities be assured they are...
Community Air Action: Air quality solutions for homes and communities, and the means to evaluate them Putting another log on the fire keeps many New Zealanders warm on winter nights. But the smoke it creates pollutes many of our towns, causing regular breaches of...
Clearing The Air: Helping managers of small businesses and community facilities to improve ventilation Gyms, churches, clinics, daycares, libraries. They all need to ensure safe and healthy air for staff, customers and visitors. But how? Many smaller buildings don’t...