Establishment and Exploration of a National Air Quality Database for Australia
Richard Sinnott1, Luca Morandini1, Philip Greenwood1, Hossein Pursultani1, Robin Wan1, Robyn Schofield1 1The University Of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Abstract
In recent years, air pollution has gained attention and is an increasing problem as more people live in cities that are ever-increasing in size. This is certainly the case in Australia with increasing populations living in major urban settlements giving rise to many challenges. Air pollution is one challenge that impacts almost all aspects of society: transport, health, climate, economy, infrastructure and planning. However, the national aggregation of real-time, definitive air pollution data sets from major State-based organisations tasked with monitoring air quality has hitherto not been realised. Several agencies now however provide programmatic APIs through which such data can be accessed and used. In this talk we present a National Air Quality Database (NAQD) that supports direct programmatic access to and integration of such data to establish a national air quality database for Australia. We explore the use of the NAQD in a case study associated with the devastating bushfires that took place in Victoria and New South Wales (in 2019/2020). We show how the air quality as recorded by the official monitoring stations around the south east of Australia changed over time.
Such official data sources are static however do not record pollution in all locations, e.g. inner cities or at major road junctions. We also describe how the NAQD can be used for real time route planning to minimise exposure to higher levels of air pollution. We present a case study focused on Melbourne and the use of mobile air quality devices based around the Airbeam technology.
Biography
Professor Richard O. Sinnott is Professor of Applied Computing Systems and Director of the Melbourne eResearch Group at the University of Melbourne. He has been lead software engineer/architect on an extensive portfolio of national and international projects, with specific focus on those research domains requiring finer-grained access control (security) and those dealing with big data challenges. He has over 450 peer reviewed publications across a range of applied computing research areas.