This website contains some alternative visualisations and tools based on data provided by the Environmental Protection Agency of Ireland. There are a number of monitoring stations around Ireland which sample the air quality. The results of this are available from the EPA under a creative commons license
which means we can do creative and interesting things with it. Over time there will be more tools added to this collection.
Data goes back to October 2021 and whilst it is pretty good, isn't guaranteed to be complete or accurate. Some monitoring stations are not active, they will probably be removed from the list. Dates will either be
in dd/mm/yyyy format or yyyy-mm-dd. Times will all be UTC with no daylight savings applied, so the same as local time in the winter.
The Map
This shows the monitoring stations with a slider above to change the time. It will default to "today" but soon there will be a date picker to select any date. The size of the circles over the station varies with the intensity of the particles counted but it should be noted that the size doesn't
mean how far that level extends away from the monitor. All measurements are at a single point and could vary considerably over just a few hundred meters.
Daily Profiles
This allows you to select any monitoring station and see the average 24 hour profile over any date range. You will be able to use this to compare a typical winter day to a typical summer day for example. In many locations you will see a distinctive seasonal bulge in the evening as fires are lit.
It shows the average as a bar chart, with lines above and below for the minimum and maximum range for each hour of the day over the date range.
As an example you could look at
Dún Laoghaire in January
and you will see that it has great air quality in the day, with an evening burn which is in the green zone on average but from the maximum line we can see it peaks at levels which would be quite poor if it was sustained as a 24 hour average.
@QualityAlerts Bot
This twitter bot announces high readings that it notices. It is a monitored account and a great way to give feedback on this site and suggest new ways to look at the data.
Leaderboard
A weekly leaderboard to name and shame the worst places for air quality!