AethLabs family of devices
We are a small company in San Francisco that makes air quality monitors that are used by researchers and scientists worldwide.
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Say hello to the world's smallest black carbon monitor: microAeth® AL30
Applications
Mobile monitoring
microAeth instruments are used to measure exposures and ambient concentrations in on-vehicle mobile studies. AethLabs’ instruments have been used to help identify hotspots, quantify near road and on-road pollutant levels as well as on bicycles, trains, planes, and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Applications
Transportation microenvironments
Portable instrumentation can be used to monitor and assess exposures in different modes of transportation. Passengers waiting at bus stops and riding in buses, trains, and automobiles can be exposed to elevated levels of particulates. Assessing exposures for drivers and passengers in different types of transportation can help characterize exposures while in transit.
Applications
Wildfires, biomass, & tobacco
Biomass, agriculture and wildfire burning make up over 80% of worldwide emissions. microAeth MA Series instruments can be used to distinguish between organic sources such as biomass, wildfire and tobacco burning as well as graphitic soot from diesel burning. microAeth devices are highly portable monitors suitable for stationary, mobile, on-person, and even vertical measurements.
Applications
Long-term stationary monitoring
Monitoring stations may be setup in urban environments on rooftops, near-roadway sites, or other locations to assess pollutant levels. Routine monitoring at these sites are intended to protect public health and comply with regulations.
Applications
Vertical profiling & UAVs
Vertical profiles of aerosol characteristics are important for characterizing the boundary layer of ground level aerosol concentrations and help to understand and quantify their radiative forcing effects. Balloons and UAVs along with small lightweight high-time resolution monitors are cost effective tools for making such measurements.
Applications
Health effects & personal exposure
Black Carbon is highly correlated with health effects and is a surrogate for diesel soot in most urban environments. As diesel soot is a known carcinogen, personal exposure measurements help correlate short and long term health effects in epedimiological studies. AethLabs’ instruments have been used by Academic, Government, community and non-profit organizations world-wide.
Applications
Community monitoring
Many communities reside near sources of emissions and are concerned about health effects. More cost effective instruments can be used to provide feedback to local communities about their exposures and local sources of pollution and help to facilitate intervention, mitigation, and environmental justice.
Applications
Indoor air quality
Particulate matter emissions can come from many sources. Indoor emissions from cooking, heating, and infiltration through leaky doors, windows and/or poorly filtered HVAC systems can cause elevated exposures indoors and can play a role in health effects.

Of interest

If you missed our hashtag#blackcarbon webinar with Drew Hill, Jeff Blair, Daniel Mendoza, Sean Wihera, and Paolo Micalizzi last week, you can now access the recording on Clarity's website!

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

"Air pollution is a pressing global issue with wide-ranging implications for human health, environmental well-being, and climate change. Among the myriad air pollutants, black carbon stands out as a significant contributor to the complex web of air quality and climate concerns we face.

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

"University of Washington partnered with the Yakama Nation Environmental Management Program to investigate characteristics of PM2.5 using 9 months of data from a combination of low-cost optical particle counters and a 5-wavelength aethalometer (MA200 Aethlabs) over 4 seasons and an episode of sum

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

In this presentation given during the 2023 USEPA Air Sensor QA Workshop (Durham, North Carolina), AethLabs discusses lab, field, and QAQC testing and considerations.

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

"...the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Italian Space Agency (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, ASI) are jointly implementing the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) investigation to explore the association between PM types and adverse health outcomes...

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

"To assess the exposure of cyclists to particulate matter (PM) and black carbon (BC), real-time mobile monitoring with portable instruments was carried out on typical bike lanes in Xi'an, China...

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

The bcsa package provide datasets for source apportionment of light absorbing carbon (LAC) in Blantyre, Malawi. The package contains data on Absorption Angstrom Exponent experiments determination of local pollution sources ...

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

"A vehicle platform and a mini-instrument were used to monitor black carbon on roads in the main urban area of Jinan for a month...

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

"BC was measured with an aethalometer (MA350, Aethlabs) along the main traffic artery in geothermally heated Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland... Stationary monitoring confirmed that traffic was the dominant source of roadside BC in winter, averaging 1.0 ± 1.1 μg/m3..."

Posted 7 months 1 week ago

"Two aethalometers — AethLabs MA350 and Aerosol Magee Scientific AE33—were co-located at an Utah Division of Air Quality site in Bountiful, Utah for just under a year.

Posted 7 months 3 weeks ago
  • Firmware

MA series firmware v1.13 upgrade is available

A new version of MA series firmware is available to upgrade your MA200, MA300, and MA350 devices. The recently released firmware v1.12 introduced source apportionment calculations and data, smoothed output for UV, Blue and IR channels, and WiFi capabilities to wirelessly transmit data to AethLabs' servers to retrieve via our dashboard or API. The latest release v1.13 offers improved WiFi stability and fixes a bug in the auto start setting.

MA series devices are availableRequest a quote

Black Carbon

Black Carbon, or Soot, is the second-leading cause of global warming, may account for half of Arctic warming, and makes people sick - it is a leading cause of respiratory illness and premature death.

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What is a microAeth?

The microAeth is a self-contained, pocket-sized instrument with flow control, data storage, and battery and makes its analysis by collecting particulates on a replaceable filter strip and utilizes the Aethalometer optical absorption technique to determine the mass concentration of Black Carbon in real time. The data can then be downloaded to a computer or uploaded to a server for subsequent processing and visualization.

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