The U.S. pulled the plug on air quality monitoring. We’re here to reboot it.

All around the world air quality monitoring data is becoming unavailable as the U.S. government has stopped publicly sharing their air quality data from over 80 embassies.
Without air quality monitoring data, especially in heavily polluted regions public health is negatively impacted and vulnerable population groups will be susceptible to worsening health impairments.

We at AirGradient are working on a few projects in the Global South using data from the US embassy monitors to calibrate our open source air quality monitors. So this also affects our work.

In quite a number of countries, the US embassy air quality monitors were often the only publicly available monitors in the whole country.

OpenAQ who is a repository for air quality data, for example lists the US Embassy monitor as the only one available in Mongolia or Pakistan:

We are Ready to fill the Gap!

With the new US administration pulling the plug, we are ready to step in. Whilst reference grade air quality monitors are not easily replaceable, our AirGradient Open Air Outdoor Monitor can be used with the EPA correction formula for PM_2.5 that we tested extensively all around the world to provide good accuracy. Read this blog post for details. Since our data can be shared directly with OpenAQ, we hope we can provide at least partially some of the missing information to researchers worldwide.

We are making available 30 air quality monitors for the most affected countries and ideally looking for US Embassy staff to host them as close as possible to the Embassy to give a continuous and comparable data stream.

If you are living in one of the affected cities, and are interested to host an AirGradient Open Air outdoor air quality monitor (that we will provide free of charge), please fill in below form.

Form