Openair - data analysis tool

Please enable Javascript for the Openair pages and tools to function in the most efficient way and take advantage of the advanced functionality.

Openair provides free, open-source and innovative tools to analyse, interpret and understand air pollution data using R; a free and open-source programming language designed for the analysis of data. The Openair tools available on this website can be used to readily perform complex and innovative analysis of current and archived air pollutant data from the AURN, allowing powerful data visualisation and interrogation capabilities for this data for the first time. This website makes it straightforward to download these graphical outputs from Openair in document ready formats.

The Openair package was primarily developed for the analysis of air pollution datasets with the ability to handle high volumes of data; the AURN, with its long data record lends itself to this. A further strength of the Openair tools is that they also allow data to be conditioned by one or more variables. For example, plots can be produced that show the inter-relationships between air pollutants and meteorological parameters, or temporal trends which vary over different time periods such as hour of day, day of week, month of year, and so on, that would otherwise not be apparent.

The Openair website contains a full description of all functions as well as downloads and guidance to help users apply the tools to their own data. UK-AIR provides simplified web access to a customised selection of the Openair tools, updated to include recent developments in Openair including tools that require meteorological data in order to run. To implement tools requiring meteorological data, modelled wind speed and wind direction data generated for the UK air quality forecast (PDF 3,161 KB) has been made available along with the measured air pollutant data.

The online tools make analysis and review of automatic data from the AURN using Openair possible without the need to install and maintain both R and Openair locally. For users that do desire full control over their analysis and output quality/format, we recommend installing R and Openair locally and obtaining data as Rdata objects from this website. In this way, the user can select and preview the desired data using the online tools prior to downloading it for further analysis in the R environment. Alternatively, data can be directly imported from this website very quickly using Openair's built-in importAURN function as described in the Openair guidance document. The most up to date version of the openair package is now published on the CRAN website and can be installed directly from here into your R console.