Why monitor Chippenham air quality?

Air quality is a major concern nationally and in certain areas of Chippenham we are no exception. With the ongoing future development of more housing in the town we have concerns that the problem will continue to get worse. Air quality is a health and climate emergency, which is why we have fundraised for equipment collecting Air Quality data, highlighting the dangers and tackling this in our community. Thank you to Chippenham Area Board for funding to support this project.

Citizen Science

We have now retired our four Zero Chippenham air quality monitors to use the Wiltshire Council Purple Air network with its wider geographical coverage. We ran our own sensors in parallel with the launch of the Purple Air network and concluded the readings correlated accurately. The wider Purple Air network allows us to track air quality changes across the UK allowing us to separate local air quality issues from wider patterns e.g. Saharan dust or wildfires.

A local data scientist volunteer has joined our team to analyse the Purple Air data. You can see live real time air quality readings in Chippenham and the wider area on the map below.

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Wiltshire Council Purple Air monitors

What is the Wiltshire Council Sheme?

The Wiltshire Council Community Air quality monitoring scheme is a new citizen science community project run by Wiltshire Council, aimed at measuring PM2.5 particulates across the county.

Zero Chippenham trialled one of the Wiltshire Council Purple Air monitors co-located with our Langley Road Air Quality monitor. This will helped us correlate our own air quality sensor readings with the co-located Purple Air Sensor.

We have now moved our project to use the Purple Air network.

Open Purple Air Map in new window

What Particulate Levels are acceptable?

What are Particulates?

PM 10 Particulates are small particles less than 10 micometres in diameter (10 to the power -6 of a metre). PM 2.5 Particulates are less 2.5 micrometers in diameter. They consist of non gaseous particles in the atmosphere that can enter the blood stream lodging in the heart brain and other organs. Particulates are of considerable concern to human health.

What are the limits?

The Air Quality Standards Regulations 2010 require that concentrations of PM in the UK must not exceed:

An annual average of 40 µg/m³ for PM10;
A 24-hour average of 50 µg/m³ more than 35 times in a single year for PM10;
An annual average of 20 µg/m³ for PM2.5.

World Health Organisation

The WHO has set tighter limits for particulates. The current guidelines state that annual average concentrations of PM_2.5 should not exceed 5 µg/m³, while 24-hour average exposures should not exceed 15 µg/m³ more than 3 – 4 days per year.

PM₁₀ (particulate matter with a diameter of 10 microns or less) concentrations of 15 µg/m³annual mean, 45 µg/m³ 24-hour mean.