The openair project » About
An enormous amount of air pollution data is collected worldwide and the amount of data collected
continues to increase. In Europe, for example, there are thousands of measurement sites. The large
bulk of this information is analysed in basic ways – often to check compliance with air quality
standards and guidelines.
This situation represents a considerable missed opportunity because more insightful analysis of
air pollution data can yield a
much richer source of information concerning the nature of air pollution such as source identification
and attribution.
Improved information concerning the sources and nature of air pollution
will help lead to the development of better policies for controlling air pollution.
The analysis of air pollution data can however be difficult. Often there is a lack of knowledge concerning
what types of technique are available (there are many), the tools required to carry out analyses can be spread
across many different types of software, or are expensive. In general, a consistent
set of tools for air quality data analysis does not exist.
The openair project
aims to address these issues by:
- Providing a free, open-source set of tools available to everyone
- Making available a range of existing techniques and developing new ones for the analysis of air pollution data
- Using the statistical/data analysis software R as a platform – a powerful, open-source programming language ideal for insightful data analysis
- Making it easy to carry out sophisticated analyses quickly, in an interactive and reproducible way
- Encourage the air quality community to use and help further develop these tools