San Bruno’s Air Monitoring Network: Now with Wind Data!

We are so excited to share that we are in the preliminary stages of incorporating wind data with our TARTA airborne metallic particle results. As you might remember from an earlier blog, we started to deploy a wind sensor alongside our TARTA deployment. 

This is a huge piece of the puzzle, by providing us with information like wind speed and wind direction. Using this, we can add a radius of origin as to where the source of our metal particles could potentially be coming from. For example, the map attached shows one of our sites that used the wind sensor to find where the most common direction and speeds were (this is called a windrose plot!). By overlaying this to the San Bruno site, we can create a radius of origin (the big red circle on the map) to narrow down potential sources. 

We have done some of the hard parts of incorporating this data, we’ve been able to record wind data over the same period of time as our TARTA detection, and our amazing engineering postdoctoral fellow Dr. Brenda Lopez Reyna made us an easy MatLab code to translate the raw data into something useful! The hardest part was figuring out how to install MatLab to our computer…. but we persevered! We are excited to combine the results from our wind data to the results we shared in our San Bruno report to see what interesting relationships we can learn! Finding out what is in the air is a huge step in advocating for air quality, but finding out where it is coming from will make it easier for residents to communicate with their local air district about sites of concern.