| Topic: | Dodgy stats | |
| Posted by: | Justin Stephenson | |
| Date/Time: | 29/04/22 18:06:00 |
| I found the website Tom pointed us to rather interesting. I put in my post code found that the air pollution was high - not a surprise I live close to the A4 - but the figures were unusually precise. I wondered how this was calculated, the nearest pollution monitor to my home is roughly 1/2 mile away. Indeed as far as I am aware there has not been a pollution monitor any where near my house in the last 10 years, probably longer. Of course I may have failed to spot some pollution monitors in side streets or close to schools so I cannot be certain that there has never been any pollution monitoring stations, even temporary ones, closer over the last decade. I am guessing that the web site is simply taking data from existing current pollution monitoring station sites and then averaging it somehow to cover areas in between the sites. So the bigger the area between sites the more likely the data is to be completely wrong. Maybe someone can explain exactly how the web site manages to calculate data for areas where there is no pollution monitoring and provide some explanation for how accurate or not the web site therefore is |