The Air Quality System

About the Client

Chief’s Inspectorate of Environmental Protection main task is: to ensure the compliance with legal requirements with regard to environmental protection, to prevent serious accidents, as well as -basing on the National Environmental Monitoring rates – to report online the data about air quality from all automatic air monitoring centres and to introduce all possible means of environmental protection.

The purpose of the project

The main purpose of the project is to provide an easy and fast access to air quality ratings in Poland to all the citizens within a specific location. The project is an answer to a currently growing awareness of pollution side effects on human’s health and life. Thanks to the application and the website, it will be useful to know when there are the best conditions to go for a walk with children or to jog.

The portal is aimed to inform effectively about the air quality and to support the tests and environment safety measurements by the Inspectorate of Environmental Protection.

Result

The systems consists of air portal accessible at: http://powietrze.gios.gov.pl/pjp/home/ and the mobile app called “The air quality in Poland’, which can be downloaded for free from: https://powietrze.gios.gov.pl/pjp/content/mobile_app.

The system was made for the Chief’s Inspectorate of Environmental Protection. It is thecentral information source on the actual air quality condition in Poland. It provides the archive, actual and forecast data for the whole country and within the specific voivodships. The air quality portal gives the clear assessment on the environmental condition thanks to the monitoring of air quality and continuous tests by the Inspectorate of Environmental

Protection. The portal additionally assists the administration in the process of air quality management in Poland, through the supply of both synthetic and detailed form, according to the designated criteria.

The important role of the portal is to increase the public awareness in regard to air quality in our country.

Solutions

We introduced the visualization of current measurement data in diversified form, such as: stations maps, data graphs, or tabular listings. We optimized the additional functionality such as data visualization on the ArcGIS maps. The data with measurements are also available for downloading as a file. Both on the portal and in the applications there are information articles that can be read.

For further development, the website is fitted with regional informatic module, specific for each voivodship and with the actual data from measurement centres. The actual air condition is monitored with the following pollution indicators: particulate matter PM10, particulate matter PM2,5, carbon oxide CO, benzene C6H6, nitrogen dioxide NO2, sulphur dioxide SO2, tropospheric ozone O3. Besides that, the short-term forecasts are provided, showing:  particulate matter PM10, nitrogen dioxide NO2, sulphur dioxide SO2, tropospheric ozone O3.

The air quality is presented on the scale: very good, good, moderate, sufficient, bad and very bad.

Taking into consideration the mobile apps users, we created the app “The air quality in Poland” working in 3 systems: iOS, Androids and Windows. The user of the app can run the automatic localization search with the result of finding local stations actual data, warnings and latest news.

Challenges

• designing the tool for generating over 3000 maps with forecasts within an hour. Time restrictions are caused by the daily actualizations of new maps, within which the data is unavailable. For that reason we aimed to achieve the shortest data generation time.
• designing the software for different platforms (Android, Android Widget, iOS, Windows Mobile, Web),
• adjusting the portal to WCAG requirements in relation to maps,
• creating the tool for generating forecast animation map,
• developing works in the old technology,
• Integrating many data bases,
• data map processing in the non-standard format.

Future

Our goal is to continue the development of the portal and mobile apps and its maintenance. We currently work on further development of the mobile app, and specifically on the introduction of map forecasts module for the whole country, based on the Air quality portal. We will add such functionalities as: screening data settings, indicator changes, the start, the pause and animation rewind, transition to the display log, access to main menu and the adjustments in the speed of animation playback. We concentrate on modernization of the existing elements, through the improvement of informatic tools for the latest technologies. The finalization of the project is planned for the Autumn 2020.