The latest BiSCAPE campaign begins!

In previous news we have already told you about some campaigns of measures of air pollutants that we are performing at different sampling points in the BiSC study area (BiSCAPE subproject – (Barcelona Life Cohort Study Air Pollution Exposure). During these campaigns, we monitor 34 different locations, making simultaneous measurements at 10-12 points for 10 days ( we do 3 series per campaign).

In total, we will be running 3 campaigns to cover different seasons of the year, as pollutant levels tend to vary depending on the time of year. This Wednesday the 12th of January we are starting the winter campaign, the last one! The campaign lasts approximately one month (3 series of 10 days), until February 14.

We did the previous ones in July 2022 (summer campaign) and in October-November 2021 (autumn campaign). We previously ran an initial winter campaign in January 2021, but despite our best efforts due to various computer issues, we were unable to collect enough quality data and had to discard it.

Figure 1. Location of the 34 BiSCAPE sampling points.

The measures of these campaigns will help us to make a dynamic model of the distribution of air pollution components in the city throughout 2021 and 2022, information that will be complemented by the measures of individual exposure of the BiSC study itself. Measurements are being made from windows, balconies, and terraces of public buildings and private volunteer homes in the cities of Barcelona, ​​Esplugues, Hospitalet, and Cornellà. Thanks to the creation of these models, we will be able to assign exposure to air pollutants to all the volunteers in the BiSC study, including those to whom we could not make the environmental visit (and those who, therefore, without the models, we would not have any information on the levels of pollution to which they are exposed). This information is very important to be able to properly estimate the impact that air pollution has on children’s health.

We hope this latest campaign is a great success!

The text has been written by Ioar Rivas, a researcher of BiSC project.