Air Quality

As I was producing an experiment that modelled the PocketLab Air as a device to give early warnings of forest fires, there were already many burning across western Canada where I live.  One such fire was near the city of High Level (470 miles from Edmonton), which was on the scale of 230,000 hectares at the time. While much of northwestern Alberta was evacuated, the smoke affected almost all of Alberta, spreading all the way down to Calgary, and creating a haze with a very post-apocalyptic feeling to it.

The State of Global Air report is an annually updated peer-reviewed document providing the most up to date information possible on global air quality and its health effects. The report includes a discussion of how air quality is measured, the health effects of the parameters, and analysis of the data in terms of health risk and sociodemographics. This article serves to provide an overview of their work and call attention to some of their interactive resources to view the data.