Citizen Science - Purple Air Example

0:00 welcome back to the melting ice and 0:02 rising seas teach out 0:04 uh today we're going to talk about 0:05 citizen science a little bit 0:07 so citizen science is an interesting 0:11 area and it's been completely 0:12 revolutionized and democratized by 0:15 the advent of the internet there have 0:17 been really cool apps that have come out 0:19 in the last few years like the cornell 0:21 labs merlin bird app 0:22 and sites like purple air which 0:25 is a site that revolves around air 0:28 quality measurements 0:30 for a few hundred dollars you can buy 0:32 this little device 0:34 set it up on the outside of your house 0:35 or your office and 0:37 it will beam real-time data 0:40 about particulate matter in the air and 0:44 it will show up on a map 0:46 lydia and i are now going to kind of 0:48 walk through the site a little bit 0:50 to just show you some of the information 0:52 that we can see 0:54 here in february of 2020 0:57 so where would you like to see well it's 1:00 interesting i'm seeing a whole bunch of 1:02 dots here a few hundred dots so these 1:04 are all different 1:05 monitors around the planet and some of 1:07 the numbers are 1:08 really high so what are these numbers 1:12 so these numbers are on the epa's 1:15 air quality index it's sort of an 1:17 abstract scale 1:19 the actual measurements are in 1:21 micrograms per cubic meter which is 1:23 basically 1:24 weighing the amount particulates in a 1:27 particular size 1:29 per cubic meter okay so that would be 1:31 what the raw measurement would be 1:32 i see and so the measurements are things 1:35 that use a measurement called pm 1:37 2.5 and pm10 right yes so 1:41 pm 2.5 that means particulate matter 1:44 with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers and 1:48 10 is obviously 10 micrometers okay and 1:51 so like the size difference so like 1:53 i found that like 2.5 is like combustion 1:56 particles and organic compounds so 1:58 very very small stuff yes and pm10 2:01 is like dust and what mold and pollen 2:05 right yeah 2:06 that's much larger and they have 2:07 different health effects as well 2:09 and so if we look at some really high 2:11 density highly industrialized 2:13 areas of the world we can see that the 2:15 numbers are really high 2:17 yeah so we can see 251 245 233 and then 2:22 the one that we set up in greenland 2:24 is zero yeah that means there is super 2:28 clean 2:28 um any value sort of 50 is about 2:31 average here on the epa scale above that 2:34 it begins to get a little unsafe 2:36 so you can see a lot of here that these 2:37 are really really 2:39 unsafe areas to be breathing air whereas 2:42 in greenland 2:43 you have no worries at all yeah that's 2:45 amazing and so 2:47 from my understanding too some of the 2:50 times where that number in greenland 2:53 goes from zero to one to 2:55 two or three that's not actually from 2:58 greenland that's not particular matter 3:01 from greenland that's coming from 3:03 canada yeah yeah north america yeah a 3:05 while back we sort of observed 3:07 numbers in here jumping because there 3:09 were wildfires in canada and 3:10 particularly drifted 3:12 in the jet stream which is this big 3:14 moving current of air 3:15 that goes from west to east and so it 3:18 dragged particulates from canada 3:20 all the way to greenland that's amazing 3:22 so yeah let's pull up the temperature 3:24 data here on purple air and oh we can 3:27 see that's negative eight 3:28 celsius right now in kangaroo slack 3:32 the rest of the world looks pretty 3:34 chilly 3:35 i guess it's the winter in the northern 3:36 hemisphere so yeah that's to be expected 3:39 yep so i'm not a scientist i would 3:42 consider myself to be a citizen 3:44 scientist as i do this kind of in my 3:45 spare 3:46 time but you're kind of a scientist in 3:47 training so 3:49 what can i do as someone that wants to 3:52 get 3:53 into citizen science more there's this 3:56 program run by the national weather 3:57 service that is free 3:58 called skywarn that provides spotter 4:01 training 4:02 to average citizens so it's free 4:06 yes it's free that's cool uh so what you 4:08 do is you be trained to 4:10 report uh like things that would be 4:13 regarded as severe weather 4:14 uh winds over 45 miles an hour over one 4:18 inch hail 4:19 tornadoes you'd be go through an hour 4:22 and a half training of what things to 4:23 report how to report them 4:25 so i mean ostensibly as just a citizen 4:28 someone out there in the world i could 4:31 help contribute to a pretty 4:32 robust data set of meteorological data 4:36 absolutely it's pretty cool so i wasn't 4:39 there when 4:40 you installed the purple air sensor in 4:43 greenland so 4:44 how did you go about doing that we got 4:47 in touch with the danish meteorological 4:49 society beforehand 4:50 and they loaned us loaned us space on 4:54 the side of a building at the top 4:56 of the black ridge outside kangaroo 4:58 slack 4:59 and so a few students perry and i 5:03 kind of sat there and we screwed it into 5:05 the side of a building and got wi-fi and 5:07 power do it 5:08 and it's a pretty spectacular spot and 5:10 actually you'll see some of that 5:12 uh footage later in this teachout so we 5:15 have these data sets here 5:17 all about weather can you tell me how 5:18 this weather data relates to climate 5:21 so weather is just the set of conditions 5:24 at a set point in time so like example 5:28 the weather at kangaroo slack right now 5:30 is negative eight degrees celsius 5:32 but the climate is a long-term average 5:35 of weather conditions 5:36 and when we look at that we can see 5:39 trends in temperature 5:40 precipitation and other variables 5:43 to kind of boil it down your 5:47 weather in any given day is just a 5:49 specific 5:51 piece of data in an overall experiment 5:54 about the climate yes absolutely that's 5:57 really cool 5:58 all right so if you found this really 6:00 fascinating you should go check out 6:01 purple air and wonder ground and other 6:03 citizen science websites 6:05 to see if there they have a station or 6:08 an instrument near you 6:09 and you should try and compare that to 6:11 our station in greenland 6:13 thank you so much for joining us