My name is Davi and I’m participating on the Brazilian local open data survey for 2017.
As I was reviewing one of the surveys I found something that I think is worth deeper thoughts.
In the picture we can see the air monitoring stations for the capital city of Brazil, Brasilia.
Two of the monitoring stations are in a scarcely populated area, the other two are very close to each other, and most of the city seems to be “unmonitored” (brown areas are more dense).
I know that the ODI is not intended to measure the instrumental quality of data collection, but the provision of data. However, in this case I feel that I can barely say that the monitoring can give me a real perception of the air quality in the city, since so much of it seems to be unmonitored.
The ODI specifically asks for data on the monitoring station, so on this particular question on the ODI it gets a positive check, but I was wondering if it should also ask about if monitoring covers the entire city, most of the city or something on these lines.
Could the monitoring stations in scarcely populated areas be because there are factories or other pollutants nearby? I had a chat with the institute for air quality in Norway while filling out the GODI, and I was told that some of the type of air pollutants (don’t remember which one) only appeared near factories, so that it didn’t make sense to have monitoring stations for the specific pollutant other places.
This is not saying that there shouldn’t be more monitoring stations in polluted areas, only a speculation on why there are monitoring stations in scarcely populated areas.
My question was not clear enough, I was asking whether there is a standard
way to measure air quality for a given territory at national level or
international level that could help you to assess whether your city is
compliant in terms of air pollution monitoring.
When assessing open data, I think that we should only refer to agreed
standards when they exist and not be ourselves judge of thing we do not
have expertise about.
That being said, you may want to have a look to this
Oh… I see. I believe there is, since I a not an specialist on the subject I was expeculating about why so few.
I’ll look into it.
Also, the link you provided does not have information about Brasilia.
