The Regional Secretary for the Environment and the Sea, Álamo Meneses, visited today the two new air quality measurement station installed in Ponta Delgada and Ribeira Grande. The results will be provided on the Internet in real-time.

The visits followed an environmental education initiative, developed in collaboration with the Eco-schools network, which prepared two awareness raising session with the purpose of explaining 4th form students what is the air, the atmosphere, air quality and how these two air measurement stations work.

According to the Regional Secretary for the Environment and the Sea, "these two monitoring stations, which became operational recently, need to be disseminated among the community in general."

During the visit to the Ponta Delgada station, Álamo Menses explained that these tools are primarily intended to provide information on air quality, adding that both station are located in the outskirts of the two cities, which allows measuring the average conditions of air quality in each urban area.

In addition to measuring meteorological aspects, such as wind speed and direction, temperature, solar radiation, precipitation and relative humidity, both stations also comprise a set of parameters regarding road traffic as they are equipped with quality analysers to measure air quality. In fact, the stations also measure the presence of pollutants in the air, such as nitrogen dioxide (NOx), sulphur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO) suspended particles of equivalent aerodynamic diameter less than 10 µm as well as particles of equivalent aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 µm (micrometres).

The government official also said that all the information collected in the measuring stations will be sent in real-time for both institutions that will analyse the data and make them available on the online portal of the Regional Government.

Thus, the public in general and the media will be able to access to easy reading information on a daily basis. The Regional Directorate for the Environment provides the information on air quality in the Region at www.azores.gov.pt / gra / sram-environment, which includes the Air Quality Index. The Definitive Index will be available by 3 PM every day as this parameter is calculated according to data measured up to that time.

The Regional Secretary for the Environment and the Sea ensured that with the installation of two new stations, the Government complements the regional monitoring network in order to expand the sampling of air quality as, until now, there was only one measurement station installed in the village of Ribeirinha on the island of Faial.