Oxford City Council has been managing two AQMesh pods, supplied by Air Monitors Ltd, in order to monitor the impact the new Westgate centre is having on local air quality.
Westgate Oxford is a brand new £440m shopping centre comprising of retail outlets, restaurants and a cinema, and was developed as a replacement to the old shopping centre that was demolished in 2016. Having recently opened in October 2017, it estimates it will attract 15m visitors every year.
The AQMesh pods were purchased by the Westgate developer under a Section 106 agreement to monitor levels of NO, NO2 and O3. Oxford City Council’s Air Quality officer, Pedro Abreu, has been using them to supplement information available from other sources. Because the pods are battery-powered they can be mounted at exactly the point in centre where monitoring is required, and easily moved to a new monitoring location when necessary. Pedro Abreu carried out co-location comparisons with a reference station and is very satisfied with the correlations he has seen with the AQMesh pods he is using.
His comments echo those of Professor Rod Jones from the University of Cambridge, who led a project using AQMesh pods across Cambridge to demonstrate how air quality varies across the city. “Because we know that all the pods read the same and because we have a comparison between one pod and a reference instrument, we can say that all pods are working equivalently across the city. What we are seeing is correspondences in excess of 0.7, 0.8, against reference – and that is very good for something straight out of the box”, commented Professor Jones.
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Browse AQMesh co-location comparison trial results.