Low Cost Air Quality Stations for Urban Environments

Decentlab (Switzerland) introduces a new low-cost air quality station to measure nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3) in urban environments. 

Empa’s Laboratory for Air Pollution and Environmental Technology, who operates the National Air Pollution Monitoring Network (NABEL) in Switzerland, has co-located eight low-cost air quality stations (45 sensors) with traditional road-side instruments in Zurich, Switzerland. The initial results look promising. 

These low-cost air quality stations are distributed in the city to increase the spatial resolution of air pollution measurements. Each station provides ppb detection levels at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches. The network of stations will measure air pollutants in ambient air with a high temporal resolution and provide continuous data in real-time.

The Zurich deployment is the result of two years work to tackle the key challenges of using low-cost sensors; calibration, sensitivity, drift and reproducibility. It took considerable time and many prototypes to establish a professional level of accuracy in the real environment.

“We hope that Decentlab’s low-cost air quality station can complement existing measurement networks” states Mark Davies from Decentlab, finally adding “and maybe soon open up new opportunities to conduct monitoring in locations and situations where traditional systems are not viable solutions.”