El Prat de Llobregat is a municipality with 65,000 inhabitants that is located in the Baix Llobregat region in the province of Barcelona, Catalonia and is part of the metropolitan area of Barcelona. Along with various industries, in its municipal area there are very important infrastructures such as the Barcelona-El Prat Airport and a part of the port area of the Port of Barcelona. For these reasons, and due to the high emissions from traffic, the city is in the special protection zone of the atmospheric environment for pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and suspended particles with a diameter of less than 10 microns (PM10), along with 40 other municipalities in the Barcelona conurbation.
Since mid-March 2021, the Prat de Llobregat City Council has been monitoring air quality in different parts of the city thanks to bettair® technology. El Prat de Llobregat has two conventional monitoring stations that are part of the Atmospheric Pollution Surveillance and Forecast Network managed by the Generalitat de Catalunya. However, El Prat acquired three bettair® devices in order to measure air pollution in other parts of the city with precision and accuracy. The devices measure NO2, NO, O3, SO2, Particulate Matters (PM1, PM2.5, PM10), temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, as well as noise pollution. The devices have made it possible to identify episodes of biomass burning and suspended Saharan dust and have much more knowledge about pollution in the city.
Recently, El Prat has proceeded to purchase two more devices to extend its bettair® network that complements traditional monitoring stations. The bettair® technology allows to have indicative measurements with precision and accuracy without the need for any type of maintenance or calibration, resulting in a very attractive solution for cities that want to expand the measurement points or for many cities and towns that do not have even a traditional station and, for the first time, can measure air quality with reliable technology.
El Prat City Council is also collaborating with Bettair Cities and Barcelona Supercomputing Center in a pilot test within a European project called iBAM (FF4EuroHPC-iBAM) to generate pollution heat maps with high spatial resolution using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to reduce the computational cost of the current numerical methods while maintaining the precision of the data. In the coming weeks, three more devices will be installed in El Prat that will allow the generation of pollution heatmaps with great precision.
Next Thursday, November 18th at 10:30am, within the framework of the Smart City Expo World Congress 2021, the Prat City Council will give a presentation on AI applied to the prevention of environmental pollution and will explain its experience of the deployment of bettair® technology. We recommend you to attend!
