The Breathing Spaces project is underway in St Denys!
We started off in January with some site visits around the neighbourhood to find some good locations for air quality sensors – we want to get a good idea of local air quality both on busy roads and in quieter spots. Over the next couple of weeks we will have 4 to 6 multi-sensor boxes installed in different locations across the area and will start to produce some graphs of the data to share with everyone.
The boxes, provided by the University of Southampton, will measure real-time levels of particulate matter as well as temperature and humidity. We will make the data from the sensors available online and use them to inform our conversations around clean air.
The image below is taken from the Government air quality monitor on the A33, which shows spikes in roadside air pollution in January this year, and the need to have a greater number of sensors around the city. (The annual legal limit for both nitrogen dioxide and PM10 is 40ug/m3).
We have also started having conversations with residents to find out where they think local pollution hotspots are, the causes of poor air quality in the neighbourhood and what we could do about them. We will be adding these comments to our online air quality map, which is in development. Watch this space! 🙂
