AIRMon air pollution monitoring at NIRS

Andrea and Nikunj from Aerospec, a Swiss startup that measures where air pollution comes from and what it's made of, are currently staying at NIRS. They are in Narsaq to show that AIRMon, the instrument they've built, can deliver useful data in the Arctic, and for the people who live here. AIRMon has been tested in the lab and in cities across Europe, but this is its first time in the Arctic. It's the only instrument that can identify all the major sources of air pollution on its own, and it's tough enough to work in the field, right now it's running in a tent outside the Narsaq International Research Station and Narsaq residents are welcome to pop by and see the instrumentation in operation.

“Getting detailed chemical data on Arctic aerosols is genuinely hard. Current methods rely on collecting particles on filters and shipping them to a lab, introducing weeks of delay, sampling artifacts, and logistical complexity that limit continuous monitoring to a handful of sites worldwide. Other real-time instruments require expert operators and maintenance infrastructure most remote sites simply cannot support. With this campaign, we are putting AIRMon to the test in exactly that context: southern Greenland, summer 2026. The goal is to come back with continuous, high-resolution chemical composition data and prove a critical capability”

The project is funded by the Swiss Polar Institute, in collaboration with the Laboratory for Environmental Spectrochemistry and the Extreme Environment Research Laboratory from EPFL.

Photo by Anna Korbut / [annakorbut.com]