ITaRS Fellow ESR2 at FASF summer school
by Umar Saeed
A 5-days summer school titled, 'Foundations and Advances in Stochastic Filtering (FASF)' was held in Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain, during the 22-26 June, 2015.
Sharing the value of atmospheric measurements with elementary school students
What is the atmosphere? How do we know anything about it? Why should we even care? These are some of the questions we tried to answer in a three-month-long ITaRS outreach activity in spring 2015. In cooperation with elementary schools and teachers in Greece, we - Athina Argyrouli, Pilar Gumà-Claramunt, Lev Labzovskii and Ioannis Binietoglou - performed a set of actions with the aim to engage young students in the study of the atmosphere and motivate their interest in this important topic in our life.
Greece is a country affected from many atmospheric pollutants. Car traffic is a major problem in many cities, and its effect on air quality is a major social issue. In the last years, a new taxation scheme on heating petrol has led many houses to use wood for heating during winter, and this caused intense smog episodes in most major Greek cities. Forest and urban fires are also frequent events affecting both visibility and air quality in wide regions of the country. Visibility is often reduced from desert dust transported from Northern Africa, and dusty car wind-shield and buildings are a familiar site. Despite all these, the atmosphere does not receive much attention in the educational system. Our activity aimed to motivate young students and teachers to get more interested and informed about the atmosphere and understand, in an integrated way, the problems of air quality and mechanisms that affect it.
In the core of our activity were four small sensors called Air Quality Eggs. These sensors measure temperature, humidity, as well as concentration of NO2, CO, and dust; these data are shared over the internet in real time. Air quality eggs are cheap sensors developed using a crowd-funding approach, through the Kickstarter platform. Their goal is to enable interested citizens to monitor the air quality where it really matters for them, in their home, work-place etc. We have used these sensors as a powerful tool to highlight to students the complex and variable composition in the atmosphere in their school and to make them aware of the importance of atmospheric measurements.
ER15 and ESR3 at ACTRIS-2 Kick-off meeting
The ACTRIS-2 Kick-off meeting took place from the 3rd to the 5th of June in Rome, Italy.
ER15 and ESR3 contribute to CNR-IMAA newsletter
The ITaRS fellows Nicolae Ajtai and Pilar Gumà-Claramunt contributed to the CNR-IMAA newsletter of last May. In this edition, the newsletter focused on the experiences of researchers from abroad currently carrying on their activities at CNR-IMAA. It can be consulted here.