The George Town Air Monitoring Station (GAMS) was commissioned in July 2007 following an initiative of the then Department of Environment, Parks, Heritage and the Arts (EPA Division). The station was funded and operated in a collaborative partnership between Bell Bay Aluminium, TEMCO, AETV Power, George Town Council, West Tamar Council, and the Department of Health and Human Services with advice and support provided by the Tasmanian EPA.
The Station was initially equipped with instruments to measure particles as PM10 and PM2.5 using Low-Volume Air Samplers (LVAS), and later Tapered Element Oscillating Microbalance (TEOM) instruments, and the gases sulfur dioxide (SO2) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) using gas analysers. The EPA operated and maintained the station on behalf of the partnership members. In late 2012 the EPA sequentially reduced its contribution to the station operation following resource-refocussing. In the following years, the air quality instruments reached the end of their operational lifetimes.
The station now houses a DRX
DustTrack instrument (optical particle counter) to measure indicative PM10 and PM2.5. Real time plots of the DRX data can be found on the George Town Real-time Air Quality page.
Graphs of (historical) validated data for this station are available via the
validated data portal.