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...
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 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...
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: 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...
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...
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: 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 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...