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Plans for five times as many independent air quality sensors in Aberdeen by end of the year

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Environmental campaigners are hoping to increase a network of air quality sensors in Aberdeen five-fold by the end of the year.

Clean Air Aberdeen want to have 100 across the city by December.

There are currently 20, with plans for 50 by the end of next month.

Researchers and data scientists want to establish a community-led air quality network to compliment the official monitoring system.

The group wants to teach people how to build their own devices to set up at their homes.

Next month, it will host a workshop at Aberdeen University to help that process.

The sensors will feed back data over the internet to a 26,000-strong worldwide network.

It is hoped the freely-available online data could be used to track air quality trends – or even to alert people with conditions worsened by bad air, like asthma.

Clean Air Aberdeen Ian Watt said: “Some of the readings we are getting back do look high – but we are jumping to no conclusions.

“We want to look at them and how they compare to official figured and to work on the consistency.

“We don’t know what is causing a few of the really high readings.

“Occasionally the equipment can be fooled by fog which is a bit of an issue in Aberdeen, but we will be writing some code to compensate for that.”

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon spoke of hopes pollution would fall in the city thanks to the AWPR.

Earlier this week she announced a 50% drop in traffic going through Aberdeen since the bypass had opened three months ago.

A low emission zone – and potentially hefty fines for older and more polluting cars – is also proposed for the city centre.

There are currently six official air quality monitoring points around Aberdeen, but campaigners argue they are too thinly spread.

They want their community network to eventually add detail to the government data to offer a more informed view.

Mr Watt added: “You could ask how they more broadly monitor air quality if there are only six – what’s it like only 500ft away?

“Long term, we want to have something that stands up to scrutiny and provides sensible alerts.”

Tickets for workshops on June 8 and 9 are available at http://bit.do/aq2