QUALITY ASSURANCE IN AN AIR QUALITY MONITORING NETWORK IN CENTRAL AMERICA Markus Hangartner ETH Zuri

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QUALITY ASSURANCE IN AN AIR QUALITY MONITORING
NETWORK IN CENTRAL AMERICAMarkus Hangartner ETH
ZurichBenjamin Lang, Swisscontact, Bolivia

• Swisscontact
• Clean Air Project Central America
• Air monitoring network
• Quality Control
• Conclusions

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Swisscontact

• The Swiss Foundation for Technical Cooperation,
  is a private non- profit Swiss entity.
• It is mainly funded by the Swiss Government,
  presented by the Swiss Agency for Development
  and Cooperation SDC.
• Swisscontact focuses its work on urban areas, in
  the training and perfectioning of technicians,
  promotion of small enterprises and urban
  environment.
• It cooperates closely with local organizations
  and institutions, be these governmental or
  private.
• Swisscontact works in different countries in
  Latin America, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.

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Clean Air project Central America

• Establishing the basic legal framework, technical
  norms and standards
• Training technical staff in exhaust gas
  monitoring of diesel and petrol vehicles
• Measuring the main air pollutants for information
  purposes and to check the success of measures
  already implemented
• Positive awareness-building of the urban
  population

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Aim of the study

• Capacity building in 6 Central American air
  monitoring laboratories
• Sustainable measuring methods
• Pollutants TSP, PM10,lead
  NO2, Ozone, CO
• Quantifying of quality over the projects time
• Trend of quality over time

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Monitoring site in Panama Citya
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Results of Air Monitoring in 6 Cities
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Organisation
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Checklist

• Documentation
• Maintenance of equipment
• Following the common manual
• handling of chemicals
• handling of samples etc.

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Preparation of spiked samplers
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Error chain
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Human aspects
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Technical aspects
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technical aspects
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Conclusions

• The participants reported that the regular
  seminars following the audits were helpful and
  contributed to increase the information flux
  between the institutions.
• The figures show, that there is a long way until
  the laboratories came up with a satisfactory
  quality. One reason might be, the turnover of
  employees amongst the laboratories.
• The production of samplers should be centralized
  in a good performing laboratory
• The results show, that is not enough to do a
  check once, but continuously in regular periods