I have have had a flurry of significant bad air quality spikes in my data the last week or so. I am on the big island of hawaii. Our volcano’s are not erupting but magma is moving a lot underground. I am wondering if these spikes (first time since owning this monitor) are significant to overall environment or if they are intrinsically local like dust from a road or someone burning trash nearby. Question is how should I understand spikes of bad air?
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Hi @George
Could you share in image of the sensor’s readings? That could help us understand if there is something abnormal going on.
Hi Kieran:
I am on the south east side of the big Island of Hawaii. Our air quality is very good 99% of the time. We have dirt (ground down lava) roads through our neighborhood. There are occasional small yard fires in the neighborhood. For the last six months, my purple air graph has been very regular without short period spikes above 30-50. These spikes were not associated with any sensible clues like the smell of smoke or sulfur dioxide (vog). No weather anomalies (ie., our trade winds have been East North East with some nighttime dead air. No volcanic eruption VOG since the Purple Air monitor installed. I am just wondering how to interpret these signals and how to rule out things like local (within a few miles) sources like fires and dirt road dust, if possible. I realize there may not be answers to these questions.
Should I consider this question answered? I am hoping to get clarification of what the spikes are representing. Local source bad air? Pockets of bad air from non-local sources? Sensor reading anomalies ? or finally, impossible to say?
Hi @George
My apologies for the delay. As you’ve suggested, it could be a number of things. Given that the two channels in your device seem to consistently agree with each other, it is likely that the readings are correct and are not due to an anomaly or debris in the sensor or something like that.
Additionally, when compared to nearby sensors, it does follow the same trends.
OK, last questions. Now, knowing normal sensor behavior, then I will assume that the data does not give any suggestion of it’s composition (ie., source or composition). Only size and number per sample. Nothing can be assumed by the rate of increase of counts or decrease of counts (ie., slope of particle count change over time). Sorry, I am new to this. Thank you. George Dunham