Making airqualitypubliclyaccessible

Luchtmeetnet consists of a data platform and a website. Michael Ameling, senior expert in air quality at DCMR Environmental Service Rijnmond, is the product owner and translated the wishes of the 6 involved monitoring networks into a functional design. The monitoring networks of RIVM, GGD Amsterdam, DCMR, ODRA, OMWB, and RUDZL upload their measurement data to the data platform every hour. Additionally, the data platform processes forecast data for the next 24 hours for the entire Netherlands (125x125m). In mid-2019, a decision was made to rebuild the website to make it easier to maintain, more mobile-friendly, and scalable. The rebranding created more unity in the platform with a modern and friendly design. The open API, which won the second prize in 2019 for the best government API, also needed further expansion.

The rebuild required a restructuring of the infrastructure to handle more incoming data and traffic. The expansion of monitoring stations and an increase in the number of visitors directly impacted the speed of the website. The solution we chose was to enable a Lambda function on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to process the measurement files. Since AWS can scale computing power where needed, the website becomes infinitely scalable immediately. Another challenge was processing and presenting forecast data in a grid. For this, RIVM divided the entire Netherlands into cells of 125 by 125 meters, with layers per cell for the different components being measured. Due to the complexity, this processing couldn't be done via a Lambda function. Therefore, it runs through a separate server set: a standalone cluster for processing and querying forecast data. On the website, the user never realizes that they are looking at different parts; everything feels and functions as one central website.