What This Air Quality Project is ready for
This Air Quality Project is ready for external methodology, provenance, data-gap and challenge interrogation. It is not yet a public claims engine for causation, breach, compliance or health effects.
From a facility-context prototype to an England-wide, data-led observatory
The project began with a narrower facility-context purpose. The present pipeline discovers and evaluates official monitoring evidence first. Supplementary locations do not seed the monitoring screen, and unvalidated inherited material has no scientific influence.
This is an independent open-source project, not an official, accredited or peer-reviewed authority. Reviewers are invited to challenge the sources, station selection, units, timestamps, missing-data treatment, calculations, coverage rules and public interpretation.
External interrogation lenses
IAQM / AQEG / atmospheric-science review
- Are target-matching and monitor-selection rules sufficiently conservative?
- Are receptor, background and comparator monitors separated correctly?
- Are meteorology and time-alignment gates explicit before interpretation?
Public-health and reference-value review
- Does the public output avoid unsupported health-causation claims?
- Are pollutant benchmarks separated from source attribution?
- Are vulnerability/receptor flags presented as context, not diagnosis?
Clean Air Programme / Clean Air Fund / EEA
- Is the data provenance clear enough for reuse and challenge?
- Are data gaps visible and actionable?
- Are official networks and open-data feeds preserved with source URLs and access dates?
UKWIN / ToxicoWatch / GAIA / Zero Waste reviewers
- Are permitting, compliance, emissions and waste-policy questions kept traceable?
- Are campaign-source materials separated from official records and peer-reviewed studies?
- Are alternative explanations and contrary evidence recorded before public claims?
Named scientific reviewers and independent experts
- Which source record supports each statement?
- What uncertainty remains before a stronger claim could be made?
- What additional monitoring, modelling or records would materially improve confidence?
Source-attribution caution
The automated site must not collapse these evidence classes into a single causal claim.
Health-based reference-value context
fine particulates / proxy evidence context
Benchmark ready: no attributionparticulates; UKHSA notes PM10 can be a proxy for other emissions in some evidence
Benchmark ready: no attributioncombustion-related nitrogen oxides context
Benchmark ready: no attributionacid gas / combustion context
Benchmark ready: no attributionsecondary pollutant context, not direct stack marker
Benchmark ready: no attributioncombustion-efficiency context
Benchmark ready: no attributionchlorinated/fluorinated acidic gases
Permit matrix neededabatement/slip and secondary particulate chemistry context
Permit matrix neededmetals including lead, zinc, chromium, mercury and others where reported
Permit matrix neededrequires specialist sampling, stack/permitting and biomonitoring evidence
Manual review requiredBenchmark cards are public-health context only. They are not source-attribution findings.
Claim boundary
No causal, legal, medical, regulatory, laboratory, comparative-risk or source-attribution determination is made by the automated output.
Recommended next evidence tasks
- Acquire and time-align official Met Office observations for every discovered event.
- Validate comparator monitor roles and create explicit urban-background, roadside and rural-background classes.
- Acquire actual DfT/WebTRIS traffic observations rather than catalogue metadata.
- Resolve principal installation permits and operator identities using exact official identifiers.
- Integrate CAMS regional fields and other competing-source layers before any source-consistent hypothesis.
- Keep the legacy Drive archive disabled; reacquire any potentially useful historic record from its original publisher before independent validation.
Request or submit external review
Methodological criticism, corrected sources and reproducibility findings are welcomed.
Scientific evidence and software assurance are different
Scientific evidence
Measurements, station and regional coverage, descriptive calculations, source records and stated limitations are the evidence available for review.
Engineering assurance
Automated checks confirm that the pipeline followed its declared rules. They do not constitute peer review, accreditation, regulatory approval or institutional endorsement.