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 is largely automated and 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 almost real-time pollution measurements, which are used to generate air quality indexes.
