Updated: 2020/Jul/07
We get multiple requests (every day) for air quality monitoring data, sometimes for a city and sometimes for the whole country; sometimes for current period and sometimes for the archives. These requests range from where to find the data to how to access the data. Here is a brief overview
Where is the data
- National Ambient Monitoring Program (NAMP) – manual monitoring network operated and maintained by CPCB, India
- Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring System (CAAQMS) – real-time monitoring network operated and maintained by CPCB, India
- System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR) – real-time monitoring network operated and maintained by IITM, Pune, India
How to access the data
Main site to access the data in India CPCB’s repository
https://app.cpcbccr.com/ccr/#/
Use the advance search option to download the data. There are some limitations in this process, on how many days of data can you request in one search. This depends on the time step you choose (last time we accessed, it is 1-week for 15-mins data per station and per pollutant).
Best is 15 mins data and you weed out all the redundant numbers like 0’s or negative numbers or 999’s or repeats or any other number you may find not meeting the quality check criteria. You can request hourly or daily average data, which will allow for downloading longer time periods, but this will likely not pass through the same level of quality check for representativeness.
- One way is to search by city name – https://api.openaq.org/v1/
measurements?city=Ahmedabad& parameter=pm25&date_from=2020- 04-01&date_to=2020-04-10& format=csv - Second way is to search by radius method (in km) – https://api.openaq.org/v1/
measurements?coordinates=23, 72.6&radius=30000&date_from= 2020-04-01&date_to=2020-04-10& parameter=pm25&format=csv -
All the openaq.org data (up until the last hour) is all stored on AWS s3 bucketshttps://openaq-fetches.s3.
amazonaws.com/index.html ( click on real time, to access the global csv files). Other ways to access data is explained in their blog piece.
Other ways to access the data
- For data scientists, here is an instructional video to dig deeper into the openAQ API service and data archives – https://youtu.be/Tiot877orkU
- For data scientists, here is another option to download data using codes developed by the members of the datameet community.
Other resources
- What is the air quality in the last 24-hours in India?
- IQair – aggregator of official and unofficial data across the globle
- Breezo.in – aggregator of official real-time monitoring data in India
- AirVeda – unofficial network of low-cost sensors
- AQI.in – unofficial network of low-cost sensors
- Purple Air – unofficial network of low-cost sensors
- Clarity – unofficial network of low-cost sensors