At CleanAIRE NC, all of our projects are collaborative in nature. Unified by purpose and strengthened through partnership, we make strides toward protecting our environment and improving health outcomes for all North Carolinians. As we celebrate the one-year anniversary of the AirKeeper Dashboard, we reflect on the importance of building and nurturing relationships with a wide range of partners, each playing a vital role in co-creating and sustaining our work.
In this special anniversary month, we want to highlight two very important partnerships that have made the AirKeeper Dashboard a tool that serves communities across the state.
PurpleAir’s Adrian Dybwad showing off an original air monitor prototype.
The premise of our Community Science program exists because we have access to reliable, accurate, low-cost sensors called PurpleAir monitors. These sensors measure pollution known as PM2.5, which are very fine particles too small for the eye to see, but when exposed to high concentrations over long periods, they can cause a range of health issues. Living near a huge gravel pit mine in Utah, the inventor of the PurpleAir monitor, Adrian Dybwad, built a sensor out of a desire to understand how this operation was impacting local air quality. Little did he know how these air sensors would play a crucial role in filling the local gaps between high-tech, government-operated monitors.
In a recent visit to the PurpleAir facility, Adrian told us how CleanAIRE NC was one of the first organizations to purchase a large order of monitors: “I like to tell people about how I was literally putting your monitors together on my kitchen counter.”
Now with thousands of monitors manufactured and an international reach, PurpleAir still operates much like a family business with partner Amanda Hawkins at the helm of operations, a small team of brilliant engineers and technicians, and their sons working alongside manufacturing staff. The PurpleAir team provides a vital service to communities around the world, not just by offering a valuable product, but also through their generous data-sharing model and open forum for users, researchers, and technicians. They operate with a genuine spirit of collaboration, recognizing that their product functions as a starting point for turning data into action to improve air quality. For all these reasons and more, PurpleAir monitors continue to be CleanAIRE NC’s top choice for our AirKeeper network.
To help us take an effective, scientifically sound approach to air monitoring and utilizing PurpleAir data, CleanAIRE NC partnered with data specialists, Eastern Research Group (ERG). In 2020, ERG evaluated the status of our AirKeeper network and helped us create our cluster network strategy. It had been CleanAIRE NC’s original goal to place at least one PurpleAir sensor in every North Carolina county, and to saturate higher-priority areas with additional sensors. The cluster network approach would place sensors based on proximity to sources of pollution, health-sensitive populations, and nearest neighboring sensor, and suggests installing monitors in groups as opposed to individuals.
AirKeeper clusters help us learn more about what might be causing spikes in air quality, and track whether monitors closer to pollution sources register worse air quality than other nearby sensors. ERG’s report also suggested downloading and storing the data, so that we could look back and see trends over time. Not only would the steps in this method create a more robust dataset, but having more than one household monitor in an area supports local advocacy efforts by encouraging users to engage with their data and with fellow AirKeepers in their cluster.
I like to tell people about how I was literally putting your monitors together on my kitchen counter.”
The PurpleAir Team with CleanAIRE NC Staff.
The First AKD Workshop with ERG.
The AirKeeper Dashboard is a tool to help visualize even more insights from PurpleAir data when paired with additional community context. We expanded our partnership with ERG to bring on a team to work with AirKeepers to co-create this tool and refine it through continued input and feedback from our users. Together with ERG’s expert developers, we launched the AirKeeper Dashboard on June 3, 2025. It advances the cluster network strategy and allows users to examine trends in air quality data across the state, map key community information, and build reports for advocacy purposes.
We celebrate this anniversary milestone with our partners at PurpleAir, our development team at ERG, and with all who have used the dashboard and provided feedback through our AirKeeper Dashboard Collaborative Network. We have many more exciting developments underway, including the “AirKeeper Dashboard 101” course on our CleanAIRE Academy, brand new partnerships with colleges and universities, and a major new release of the AirKeeper Dashboard coming this Fall. Together we can build an even greater coalition of partners for clean air and healthy communities!
