Informing Interventions through Use of a Dense Monitoring Network for Rural Woodsmoke Impacted Communities

摘要

Introduction. Rangiora is a rural town in South Island, New Zealand where the use of wood for home heating is prevalent. The West Silver Valley is a historic mining area along the Coeur d'Alene River in northern Idaho, U.S. Due to cold temperature inversions and the predominant use of wood fuels for domestic heating, both communities (and others like them) often exceed health-based standards for particulate matter (PM10 in New Zealand and PM2.5 in the US). Using low-cost PM monitors, we provided policymakers, community members and students across both communities with tools to visualize temporal and spatial variance in ambient woodsmoke. Methods. We deployed 13 low-cost solar powered monitors across Rangiora in 2017 and 12 across the West Silver Valley in 2018, capturing PM2.5 at one-minute intervals over a period of seven and four weeks respectively. Following a quality control procedure, data were ingested into a visualization system previously used by NIWA for presenting weather forecasts and climate summaries for New Zealand. In addition to engaging with residents and state air quality agency personnel, we worked with school administrators to introduce opportunities for students to utilize these dense network air monitoring tools within the context of their science-based curricula. Results. The low-cost monitors exhibited a high degree of stability with nearly 100% data recovery. The data was used to create maps of air quality that described previously unknown spatio-temporal variation in air quality. Animations of the data effectively communicated the highly dynamic nature of air quality and exposure, informing community and regulatory uncertainty over the validity and representativeness of fixed regulatory monitoring sites. Conclusion. A PM sampling network, when combined with visualization tools, reveals new information at a sub-community level that can be used to illustrate fine-grained exposure assessment, stimulate engagement and inform decision making.