Sustainability Action Fund GHG & Air Quality Monitor

GEMM is the recipient of a 2024 Sustainability Action Fund Grant to install a green house gas and air quality monitoring device to measure CO2, NO, NO2, O3, CO and PM2.5 in real-time. The data will be publicly available and can be used to increase visibility of the impact of air quality on climate and health or allow deeper engagement with climate data through student projects and research.

Through the support of a Sustainable Action Fund Grant from the Sustainability Office at the University of Waterloo, the GEMM Initiative will be installing a BEACO₂N Air Monitor on campus.

The BEACO₂N, developed by the University of California at Berkeley, contains sensors for CO₂, NO, NO₂, O₃, CO, and aerosol in addition to sensors for temperature, pressure, and relative humidity. Data from these sensors is collected once every five seconds onto a miniature computer which sends the data to a centralized server.

Once installed on the University of Waterloo campus, the data will be publicly available for students, researchers, educational outreach, and the wider community. For the GEMM Initiative, this will be a demonstration site and first step in building a larger urban air monitoring network. Instead of using a small number of extremely sensitive and expensive instruments to measure a large area (such as the air quality reference station in Kitchener), we envision a network of lower cost, moderate accuracy monitors, each producing highly localized measurements of green house gases and particulate matter.