Air quality meter

Air pollution measurement is the process of collecting and measuring the components of air pollution, notably gases and particulates. The earliest devices used to measure pollution include rain gauges (in studies of acid rain), Ringelmann charts for measuring smoke, and simple soot and dust collectors known as deposit gauges.

Modern air pollution measurement techniques characterize ambient air quality using data from three main sources: direct measurements of on site sources, computer models, and remote sensing platforms such as satellites.Air pollution measurement can be carried out using many different devices and techniques. These range from simple absorbent test tubes known as diffusion tubes through to highly sophisticated chemical and physical sensors that give near real-time pollution measurements, which are used to generate air quality indexes.