Large Air Quality Data Set Available for Download

During my PhD, we built ten sensor nodes to measure different air pollutants and deployed them in the city of Zurich (Switzerland) on top of public transport vehicles. With this installation we collected a unique pollution data set comprising by far the largest number of measurements at that time.

Balz Maag, a co-researcher, made part of this unique data set publicly available: https://zenodo.org/record/1415369#.XCy6Sy2ZOgS

Zenodo is a strong supporter of open data in all its forms (meaning data that anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute) and takes an incentives approach to encourage depositing under an open license.

The data set contains 11 million samples, this is one year (from April 2012 to April 2013) worth of ultra-fine particle (UFP) concentration measurements. The data was collected by a mobile sensor network. The sensors were mounted on top of 10 streetcars in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The data has been post-processed by performing a periodic null-offset calibration and  filtering samples during malfunction.

A small excerpt of the data set:

time,lat,lon,hdop,tram_id,num_particles,diam_particles,ldsa
2012.04.19 14:12,47.373288,8.522049,1.1,5,6400,48.1,16.0
2012.04.19 14:12,47.373272,8.522053,1.1,5,6545,47.4,16.1
2012.04.19 14:12,47.373253,8.522068,1.1,5,6656,47.2,16.3
2012.04.19 14:12,47.373244,8.522065,1.1,5,6731,47.1,16.4
2012.04.19 14:12,47.373233,8.522051,1.1,5,6451,47.9,16.0
2012.04.19 14:12,47.373233,8.522044,1.1,5,6400,48.1,16.0
2012.04.19 14:12,47.373237,8.522035,1.1,5,6178,48.7,15.7
2012.04.19 14:12,47.373248,8.522030,1.1,5,6378,47.2,15.6
...

The data set has been used and is described in more detail in the following publications:

• David Hasenfratz et al. Pushing the Spatio-Temporal Resolution Limit of Urban Air Pollution Maps. IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom). Budapest, Hungary, March 2014. Best Paper Award.
• David Hasenfratz et al. Deriving High-Resolution Urban Air Pollution Maps Using Mobile Sensor Nodes. Pervasive and Mobile Computing. Elsevier, 2015.
• David Hasenfratz et al. Demo Abstract: Health-Optimal Routing in Urban Areas. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN). Seattle, USA, April 2015.
• Michael Müller et al. Statistical modelling of particle number concentration in Zurich at high spatio-temporal resolution utilizing data from a mobile sensor network. Atmospheric Environment. Elsevier, 2016.