Seeking Guidance: Accessing PurpleAir Monitor Data for Virginia

1

Hello everyone,

I am currently working on a research project related to air quality monitoring and am trying to identify all PurpleAir monitors located in the state of Virginia. Specifically, I am looking for a way to obtain a list of monitors along with information indicating whether each monitor is categorized as indoor or outdoor.

I have reached out to the PurpleAir team directly, but I wanted to also ask the community in case someone has experience working with this data.

If anyone has suggestions on:

  • how to retrieve a list of PurpleAir sensors for a specific state,

  • whether indoor/outdoor classification is available in the public dataset or API,

  • or tools/scripts others have used to extract this information,

I would greatly appreciate your guidance.

Thank you in advance for any help or direction you can provide.

2

Hi Carolyn,

I can see that we addressed this inquiry internally. For anyone else reading this, you can certainly get this type of data through our API. The location_type field from our API being included in a bounding box query is a sensible approach here. For those unfamiliar with using our API, we have an article to help you get started.