Review of Next Generation Air Monitors for Air Pollution

Traditional air quality monitoring networks are the foundation for air quality management, policy and regulations, population exposure assessments and health effects research. With increasing awareness of spatial variability in air pollution concentrations within cities and the importance of pollution gradients from traffic and neighborhood sources, such as residential wood combustion, there is an increasing need to also evaluate air pollution variability at local or neighborhood scales. While passive sampler networks, mobile monitoring campaigns and the application of land use regression and dispersion models have provided useful information on air pollution spatial variability, none of the approaches can fully characterize both short-term temporal and spatial gradients in pollutant concentrations. Recently, there has been a proliferation of low-cost, low power, miniaturized, autonomous (and typically wireless) air quality monitoring units that have the potential to be applied in dynamic dispersed high resolution air quality monitoring networks and to be used in "Citizen Science" applications. In this report we review new air quality monitoring technologies and discuss their use in the context of conventional monitoring and new applications. We summarize information on sensor performance and provide recommendations regarding future applications.Medicine, Faculty ofPopulation and Public Health (SPPH), School ofUnreviewedFacult