Data Acquisition and Monitoring System - A State Funded Air Quality Monitoring System Development

摘要

The Environmental Protection Agency has classified Clark County, Nevada as a "serious" non-attainment area for particulate matter (PM 10 and PM 2.5) and carbon monoxide (CO). The Nevada Center for Advanced Computational Methods (NCACM) of University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is assisting the Department of Air Quality Management (DAQM) to develop and implement a new environmental system that will provide more reliable and flexible data acquisition and monitoring services. Since the regulatory and enforcement role of the DAQM, it is required to measure and report to the public the impact of aeroallergens as well as visibility and haze issues. Currently 27 monitoring stations are located throughout Clark County. This paper discusses the development of the acquisition and management system and demonstrates the interface and functionalities developed. The system provides agency staffs an integrated environment to acquire, monitor and manage air quality data and the pubic a web-based tool to access the collected data. We designed a three-tier system, data acquisition, processing and analysis, and repository for this project. The data acquisition module was written in Microsoft Visual Basic with LAB VIEW components provided by National Instruments. Raw data require processing by mid-tier processing module before inserting into the back-end SQL server database tier. As its modularized design concept, more service and analysis tools can be added through its data analysis/processing tier. To ensure that Clark County will reach and maintain attainment of all federal air quality standards, more sophisticated atmospheric forecasting model, developed by the NCACM, will be applied to monitor and predict pollutants around the valley.