22
BAMOS
Mar 2019
Article
Citizen science meets urban climate:
the Schools Weather and Air Quality
(SWAQ) project
Melissa Hart, Angela Maharaj, Giovanni Di Virgilio
University of New South Wales
Email: [email protected]
Schools Weather and Air Quality (SWAQ) is a citizen science
project funded by the Australian Government’s Department
of Industry, Innovation and Science as part of its Inspiring
Australia—Citizen Engagement Program. SWAQ will place
meteorology and air quality sensors in Sydney schools to collect
data for urban climate, meteorology and air quality research.
This project is the first of its kind in Australia and SWAQ has
partnered with instrument vendor Vaisala to create a base
monitoring network covering 20 primary schools across the
Sydney metropolitan region.
Urbanisation can modify the climate in cities resulting in the
urban heat island (UHI) effect. This results in city residents bearing
the brunt of both global (e.g. climate change) and regional (e.g.
the UHI) heat impacts (Krayenhoff et al., 2018; Thorpe and Hart,
2013). Both temperature and air quality can also vary greatly
within cities due to spatial variability in land-use, surface and
geographical characteristics, pollutant emissions and transport
infrastructure (Di Virgilio et al., 2018; Hart and Sailor, 2009).
Currently there are insufficient meteorological and air quality
observation sites to adequately monitor the effects of increased
urbanisation on local-scale weather and air quality in most
Australian cities. The SWAQ project provides a pilot for how
citizen science could potentially enhance monitoring networks,
increase STEM engagement and give the public more agency
in their daily decision making through access to localised,
high temporal-resolution weather and air quality data. Sydney
is an ideal test case because it is Australia’s largest city, and is
undergoing rapid development, but it has not been the focus of
much urban climate or air quality research.
The citizen science
The citizen science component of SWAQ will involve school
students engaging in the siting and installation of instruments
and analysing the data in curriculum-aligned classroom
activities. School teachers and students will be able to monitor
conditions at their school in real-time and relate how changes
in pollution concentrations are driven by meteorological
conditions, or how the onset of events such as bushfires,
heatwaves, or thunderstorms can affect air quality. Participating
primary schools will also benefit from engaging outreach
activities to gather additional data (e.g. land use classification,
estimating sky-view factors). Students will learn valuable
STEM skills through directly being involved in the analysis of
meteorological and air quality data collected in their school
grounds. For high school students, the project will demonstrate
how the collected data can be used for student research projects
such as the New South Wales (NSW) Science “depth studies” in
Years 11 and 12.
A few of the members of the project team (left to right): Angela Maharaj (SWAQ), David Dicker (Vaisala), Melissa Hart
(SWAQ), John Liljelund (Vaisala), Giovanni Di Virgilio (SWAQ)..