Purple Air Monitors
Purple Air Monitors
Increasing air quality awareness is important for the Cal State East Bay community. As part of a research project Dr. Michael Schmeltz, in the Department of Public Health, installed PurpleAir air quality sensors on the Hayward campus. PurpleAir is an air quality monitoring network that measures particulate matter, PM1.0, PM.2.5, and PM10. PurpleAir produce low-cost sensors available on their website. Data is live-streamed from their monitors and compiled on a mapping tool available for the public and professionals alike to keep up to date with AQI ratings anywhere PurpleAir sensors are located. Recently the Environmental Protection Agency and state air quality monitoring agencies have incorporated these low-cost sensors into their air monitoring networks on the AirNow website. View Cal State East Bay on PurpleAirMaking Sense of PurpleAir
If you have used PurpleAir in the past and compared it to the official AQI on AirNow, you may have noticed some discrepancies.
The first is that some PurpleAir monitors are placed indoors. You can click off this feature to only display PurpleAir monitors outside, or vice versa - see the diagram below.
The other factor is the type of air pollution, particularly for the Bay Area. We get a lot of wildfire smoke and this can cause inaccuracy in the PurpleAir monitors skewing the results high. The PurpleAir Map website comes with an easy conversion factor you can apply when the majority of the air pollution is from wildfire smoke. You can choose the options of LARPA, AQandU, WOODSMOKE, or US EPA to see a truer representation of the air quality during wildfire smoke events - see the diagram below. The PurpleAir website goes into detail about the conversion factors, and each can be explored in detail.
