Sharing Air Quality Monitoring Activities at a University in Nigeria

Breathing is life and the quality of air we breathe is important for good quality of living. At the Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria, the Space Weather and Atmospheric Physics Laboratory has collaborated with the Center for Atmospheric Research to establish a network of air quality monitoring and data gathering techniques through setthing up monitoring stations and recently collaborating with the Alliance for education, Science, Engineering and Design in Africa (AESEDA), using low cost air quality monitoring devices and combining the ground-based data with sattelite data to give meaningful and useful data for safety. Data of air pollutants measured and how they correlate with increasein respiratory tract infections during the pandemic were studied. We present the activities of air quality monitoring during the period of 2020; the hieght of the pandemic and the period thereafter. Findings show that there is a need to be concerned as readings of impact of air pollutants are high and most times hiher than the minimum EPA standards.