OpenAQ

[Andreas.Motl]

About

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What if all of the world’s air quality data were available to explore?

Our mission is to fight air inequality by opening up air quality data and connecting a diverse global, grassroots community of individuals and organizations.

We are currently collecting data in 92 different countries and are always seeking to add more. We aggregate PM2.5, PM10, ozone (O3), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and black carbon (BC) from real-time government and research grade sources.

Story

The idea for OpenAQ came from observing the impact of a lone air quality monitor producing open data, set up by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

It spurred OpenAQ co-founders, Christa Hasenkopf, an atmospheric scientist, and Joe Flasher, a software developer, to set up a small open air quality project in Ulaanbaatar along with Mongolian colleagues.

Eventually, they and a community of open data lovers from around the world decided to see what would happen if all of the world’s air quality data were made available for the public to explore.

Map

– OpenAQ Worldmap

API

Introduction

Code

It looks like the whole infrastructure is open source.

OpenAQ Platform

Picks

• GitHub - openaq/openaq-data-format: A description of the data format provided by the OpenAQ platform.
• GitHub - openaq/openaq-fetch: A tool to collect data for OpenAQ platform.
• GitHub - openaq/openaq-api: OpenAQ Platform API - NO LONGER IN USE see https://github.com/openaq/openaq-api-v2

Community tools

• GitHub - ropensci-archive/ropenaq: ⛔ ARCHIVED Accesses Air Quality Data from the Open Data Platform OpenAQ
• GitHub - nickolasclarke/openaq: A JS client for the OpenAQ API
• GitHub - dhhagan/py-openaq: Python wrapper for the Open AQ API
• OpenAQ Browser

Resources

• Data coverage: https://medium.com/@openaq/where-does-openaq-data-come-from-a5cf9f3a5c85
• Adding data: https://medium.com/@openaq/how-can-a-government-source-add-data-to-openaq-50b5d83ef13f
• Accessing historical data: https://medium.com/@openaq/how-in-the-world-do-you-access-air-quality-data-older-than-90-days-on-the-openaq-platform-8562df519ecd

Evaluation

Judging by “collecting data in 92 different countries”, OpenAQ seems to be a huge and mature platform. Looking under the hood of GitHub - openaq/openaq-fetch: A tool to collect data for OpenAQ platform., it acquires air quality data from a huge number of data sources using a plethora of data adapters.

• openaq-fetch/sources at develop · openaq/openaq-fetch · GitHub
• openaq-fetch/adapters at develop · openaq/openaq-fetch · GitHub

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cc @wtf