[cga contact: Lex Berman]
With the recent decision by the Indian Goverment (announced in April 2015) to publish hourly Air Quality Index [AQI] monitoring data, CGA has begun to investigate how we might systematically collect, archive, and analyze this information.
With technical documentation provided on the Indian Ministry of Environment Central Pollution Control Board website ( http://www.cpcb.nic.in/air.php ), we found suitable details about the monitoring equipment and data collection methodology to take a closer look at their data.
IIT Kanpur, the technical unit responsible for making these monitoring observations available, has launched a public website: http://164.100.160.234:9000/
Based on a detailed investigation of this website, CGA team members Lex Berman and Devika Kakkar have developed a prototype to acquire daily average and hourly readings from the official MOE monitor stations. Currently there are only about 50 statioins registered in the Pollution Control monitoring network. These stations are distributed geographically as shown in the following map.
The prototype data collection tool identifies the stations, their locations, then acquires hourly readings for AQI measurements such as PM2.5, So2, No2, CO, O3, and also gets synchronous meterological information from a separate web service.
The preliminary testing data can be graphed to show daily activity for PM2.5, for example.
[Note on graphs: the average values which show “0” are not zeros but have values of “-“ or “N/A” in the source files, i.e there are no average values reported for that date.]
CGA is currently seeking collaborators to move this prototype to a production system for continuous acquisition of the Indian Air Pollution data, which can be made available as a public archive for academic research (similar to our China AQI data collection: http://aqi.cga.harvard.edu/china/about/).
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