As someone with at least a partial education in the sciences, how seriously would you take crowd-sourced Air Quality Index data from a site like Weather Undergound?
I have persistent year-'round allergies and mild asthma, but am an athlete of sorts (road race cyclist). Air quality affects me overall for those reasons so I pay attention to it.
There are two other sources of AQI data I available to me: a site run by my County, and a hand-held instrument that measures PM2.5 and PM10.
These sources rarely agree with each other. Sometimes they can very much contradict each other.
If there's little-to-no prevailing winds, as is sometimes the case in the valley I live in, I'm thinking that all these AQI monitors, not having a breeze to clear out their local areas, are giving stale readings.
Additionally I'm thinking that since the crowd-sourced monitors are usually not installed by a professional, their placement on peoples' property may not be optimal, exacerbating the inaccuracies when there's no breeze.
What's your opinion, /sci/ ?
I have persistent year-'round allergies and mild asthma, but am an athlete of sorts (road race cyclist). Air quality affects me overall for those reasons so I pay attention to it.
There are two other sources of AQI data I available to me: a site run by my County, and a hand-held instrument that measures PM2.5 and PM10.
These sources rarely agree with each other. Sometimes they can very much contradict each other.
If there's little-to-no prevailing winds, as is sometimes the case in the valley I live in, I'm thinking that all these AQI monitors, not having a breeze to clear out their local areas, are giving stale readings.
Additionally I'm thinking that since the crowd-sourced monitors are usually not installed by a professional, their placement on peoples' property may not be optimal, exacerbating the inaccuracies when there's no breeze.
What's your opinion, /sci/ ?
