Community-to-Community Training on Air Sensors

Thanks to our partners at Casa Familiar in San Ysidro and San Diego State University in California for hosting a community-to-commuity training today on air quality sensors. This was the second in a series of workshops on establishing community air sensor networks.

This particular workshop started off with opening remarks by Idalia Perez of US EPA US-Mexico Border Program talking about the challenges of border communities such as San Ysidro.

Sarina Vega of Casa Familiar and Penelope (Jenny) Quintana of San Diego State University spoke about identifying community concerns, pollution sources, and having that drive which pollutants to monitor for the community.

I spoke about our community-engagement that led to design decisions for the community air monitors we made for San Ysidro. At the start of our work in San Ysidro, we didn’t have commerically-available-off-the-shelf monitors that measured everything we wanted to, and so we designed and built our own custom monitors for the project that measured 4 types of gas pollutants, particles with 4 sensors, and temperature and relative humidity. We designed the data handling and networking the way that we thought would be best for the project.

Meiling Gao of Clarity.io spoke about how her company supports community air monitoring as a service that includes monitors, training, data QA/QC, and data visualization.

Mariano Munoz spoke of his role as a community member, maker/tinker in helping to transition the technology to be based within San Ysidro.

Elena Austin of the University of Washington spoke on her role on the project in data QA/QC, calibration, and data presentation.

This workshop was developed as part of an AB617 grant from the California Air Resources Board.