Air-Quality Monitoring in an Urban Area in the Tropical Andes

Manizales is a tropical Andean city in Colombia that has obtained outstanding achievements in the continuous and effective monitoring of the air quality. This article describes the air-quality monitoring system of Manizales and its corresponding data center, which is a system designed to perform a periodic vigilance of the concentration of the main air contaminants. The structure of one data warehouse is explained, along with the components of monitoring networks, equipments, and technological tools and processes that allow the acquisition, storage, processing, and analysis of the air-quality data.