One of the projects selected after the Expo-2017 by an expert working group for potential application in our country is an innovative environmental monitoring station, presented in the Finland pavilion. This was told by the Head of the Kazhydromet RSE laboratory Dana Amanbayeva at a briefing held today in the press center of the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

"Since July 11, 2017, at an automatic air quality control station in Astana, one Vaisala sensor of Finnish production has been installed to test the adaptation to the conditions of Kazakhstan and to compare the data with Russian instruments used for air quality monitoring at the present time," D. Amanbayeva said.

At the same time, the representative of Kazhydromet noted the advantages of Finnish know-how: sensors of small size, mobile, easy to install anywhere in the city, for example, on a pole, wall or roof of a building, so there is no need to allocate a separate plot of land. In addition, the sensor has high accuracy, the error is 1-3% – this is the best indicator for such devices. Thanks to the solar panels, the sensor has low power consumption.

Also, for Kazhydromet it is important to have an additional set of meteorological parameters in addition to air quality sensors, because when determining pollution, it is necessary to know the direction, wind speed and other environmental parameters.

In addition to the advantages, the speaker noted the shortcomings revealed during the use of the sensor. So, in the current configuration, the device does not have sensors for determining hydrogen sulphide and nitrogen oxide, which are important components for air control in large cities. However, Vaisala plans to complete the development of these sensors before the end of 2017.

"Based on the results of the analyzes, the results of the comparison of the Vaisala sensors and gas analyzers installed in the environmental monitoring network of Kazhydromet will be announced," D. Amanbayeva concluded.

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Kazhydromet RSE has been cooperating with Vaisala Group since 2005. Within the framework of Expo-2017, the Finnish partner presented the automatic sensor for atmospheric air quality AQT-420, which measures automatically the concentrations of six pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone, suspended particles PM2.5 and PM10.