School and college projects

There are many references and links to other sites in this website that you can use to help with your project to provide you with data and information for school and university projects. You can also look at the various air quality reports in the document box below which will be able to help you, particularly if you start with the most recent ones published and look at the data in the appendices.

Herefordshire Council's Air and Water Team can email specific hourly data from our Edgar Street station to students for project work, although you should allow time for a reply. (We are looking to see how we can include hourly data on this site). Such requests should specify what period of time and which areas of the county the data is requested for - e.g. “Please could you provide me with any air quality data you might have for Hereford City Centre for the period June to July 2006”. These email requests should be made to ethelpline@herefordshire.gov.uk

Data for hourly ozone and nitrous oxide levels can also be found on the government’s website for the Leominster Monitoring Station.

We are aware of at least two local schools who monitor and record weather which can then be compared to Herefordshire Council’s data and the government’s air quality data. These schools are Aylestone and Whitecross and if you attend these schools you should approach the Head of Geography. If your school does not record weather, data can still be obtained from the nearby Shobdon airfield site in north Herefordshire.

Some ideas of good projects undertaken by students with our data are:

• compare and contrast air quality for different parts of the county or different parts of the city of Hereford and discuss the reasons why the levels are different - e.g. is the air quality along Edgar Street in Hereford worse than in a rural village and do you think that this might be due to traffic levels or something else?
• try to correlate air pollution levels with weather data for a chosen period of time and explain your findings - e.g. is the level of air pollution worse or better at Edgar Street when the weather is windy or when it is still and foggy? Does sunlight have an effect on ozone levels? Why would the rural site at Wellington have higher ozone levels than the city centre site at Edgar Street?
• Compare the hourly readings at Hereford’s Edgar Street and look to see how levels vary depending on the time of day and the day of the week - e.g. is the pollution level worse in the morning and evening rush hours? Why do we only see a rise in pollution between 3 and 4pm when there are no school holidays? Are the Wednesday market days still worse for pollution? What are the levels like on a foggy shopping day in Hereford in the run up to Christmas?
• Download hourly air quality data and carry out various statistical analyses and use this to interpret your data and suggest the reasons behind this. This can be as simple as taking averages or determining monthly means from hourly data for primary school projects or can alternatively lead to statistical correlation techniques and the plotting of graphs and longterm trend lines. e.g. take an average of the air quality on your birthday or on any other day you are interested in then do an excel graph, plotting time against pollution. Alternatively, download monthly data for a diffusion tube site from 2000 to the present, plot this and then look at the long term trend - for some sites you can sometimes explain peaks and troughs if you know when roadworks or road closures occurred for example.

There are obviously many other good project ideas out there and it would help us to help other future students if you could email your suggestions to us so that we can post these on this website. These project ideas can be emailed to ethelpline@herefordshire.gov.uk