It is much colder in Poland during winter than in the summer. Polish weather is rather long-lasting, for example sometimes it rains constantly for a few days or even more.

Location of the test site:

ZSiPO in Nysa, II LO, Poland

How do people influence quality of air in Nysa?

 Goal of the research is to find out how quality of air within a day and longer period of time. The meansurements could raise awareness about pollution in atmosphere. Maybe in future people will try to prevent this.

To measurments we have used app called Airly and GPS in a cellphone.

The measurments were done every day on 9AM and 9PM. We were checking number of particles in the air, temperature, air pressure and humidity. Later, we wrote the data from a few days, analysed it and we turned them into graph available in Padlet app. The measurements had done from street Celna for nine days, but from street Rodziewiczówny for three weeks.

Street Celna 

Most important data was from 10 and 11 december 2019, where you can find most visible corelation beetwen temperaturę and air quality. Day by day, the temperaturę has dropped about 3 degree Celsius and the number of particles have risen about 50%.

Street Rodziewiczówny
Results shows that highest pollution is when air temperature is lower. The air pressure and humidity don’t change radically. The worst air quality was 04.12, 05.12, 11.12 and 18.12 about 9 PM

It shows that temperature has influence on quality of air, because the lower it is, the higher is demand on furnace fuel, to warm houses. It causes increase in pollution, because in a lot of houses, people still using low quality furnaces and used trash like: plastic or rubber to heat them. In winter more people use different types of transport when they need to go somewhere. Car exhaust contributes to air pollution. I think that in the evening pollution is higher, because everyone just try to get home.

We need to encourage people to learn about quality of air and how they can change it. People should see the research like this to understand how impact they have to the atmosphere.

Key words: air, measurments, temperaturę, trash, furnaces

We find out that quality of air drastically lowers during winter, so that gave us first hint why that happens. During winter air quality in Nysa is really bad. It is not on a level of cities like Łódź or Huta in Cracow, but it is really close. During summer quality of air in decent.
 For a few years, Winters in Nysa are not that strong like they used to be. Temperature often is above -10 degree Celsius. That causes people do not need that much heat in their houses. Usually they need to heat during evening and nights. For a most day the temperature on Celna street and Rodziewiczówny street was higher than 0 degree of Celsius the highest temperature was 9 degrees of Celsius. So when that happened, quality of air was the best. Around 10 to 20 PM per m³. But when temperature was lower, quality of air also lowered. So we have seen the corelation beetwen temperature and air quality. All od data confirms that theory.

The result are important because they affect our health. Quality of air sometimes is that bad, that it is better to stay at home, than go for a walk. It would be better for our health. Application was showing notification when the air was really polluted, and suggested to stay at home.

We need to focus on that to inform people so that they are aware of their actions. Heating with trash only can cause worst situation, and they are not aware of that. And also trash is not that effective like coal or wood. And quality of furnaces matters a lot. They are often old and used very much. That causes it needs more fuel because it can lose much more heat than deliver.  A lot of old furnaces also doesn’t have proper filter which also affects air quality. Moreover car exhaust have huge impact to affection of the air.

People could watch some documentary video about pollution to raise awareness, restrict heating in homes, use public transports or walking. 

Protocols that we used:
- Test protocol for atmosphere pollution
- GLOBE atmospheric test protocol- description protocol of the atmospheric test site