The openair project

News published: 20/05/2009

The Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds is pleased to announce the launch of the openair project. The 3-year openair project is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) with additional funding from Defra, AEA and several local authorities.

The project aims to make innovative, open-source data analysis tools available for free to the air quality community. These tools are designed for the analysis of air pollution data and dispersion model output. The underlying theme of the project is that considerably more useful information can be gleaned from air quality data using tools specifically designed for the purpose than is usually the case. As such, the tools should have wide appeal from central and local government, consultancies, regulators and university researchers. Many of these tools would normally require specialist visualisation or statistical software but have been made available in the highly developed open-source statistical software called R.

The website at http://www.openair-project.org/ provides more details on the project and a pre-release version of the openair "package" that users can test ahead of its final release in October 2011. The project will be continuously developed over the next few years and we are keen to receive user feedback to ensure the tools are of maximum benefit to the community.

AEA and ITS are working to apply these tools to AURN data presented on the AQ Archive. This will allow web users a greater range of functionality, visualisation and analysis when interrogating the national network measurements.

Contact: David Carslaw (d.c.carslaw@its.leeds.ac.uk)

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