Introduction to Openair

Openair provides free, open-source innovative data analysis tools in R; a free and open-source programming language designed for the analysis of data. The tools, documentation and other resources are available through the openair website. The powerful graphing capabilities of openair have been applied here to allow complex and innovative analysis of current and archived air pollutant to be readily undertaken.

Many of the tools benefit from a high volume of data. However the value of the tools is in being able to apply an additional ('conditioning') variable such as splitting plots out by different time periods (hour of the day, day of the week, month etc). In these cases, the volume of data available for each category may become significantly lower than plotting the entire data series up. It can also significantly increase the processing burden for the analysis and therefore the time required for the website to produce the plots. So if you've chosen a long time series, several sites or to plot them by hour of the day, please be patient.

Currently this website provides a subset of the complete functionality of Openair, focussing on those tools that do not require met data in order to run. However 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.

In addition to using these online tools to analyse and review automatic data from the Scottish air quality network, the user can also download the data as an R object, suitable for importing straight into R for further analysis. In this way, the user can select and preview the data desired using the online tools prior to downloading it for further analysis in the R environment.