In his 29c3 talk [0], Sean Bonner from Safecast [1] mentioned that air monitoring is something they'd like to do as well. I'm very much interested in monitorin

In his 29c3 talk [0], Sean Bonner from Safecast [1] mentioned that air monitoring is something they'd like to do as well. I'm very much interested in monitoring air pollutants. I live in a place in Germany where BASF built "the worlds largest chemical plant" right next to the centers of two cities with about half a million residents combined [2]. And of course, you can smell that they pollute the air with something. Yet there is no information whatsoever on which chemicals they dump into the air and what the concentration is. The usual air quality measurements cover O3, SO2, NO2 and PM10 [3]. It's probably easy to monitor those yourself, just buy a sensor. But how do you monitor something that you can smell, you don't know what it is? Mass spectrometer? [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyGjdloVPKQ [1] http://blog.safecast.org/ [2] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.4947&lon=8.4424&zoom=14&layers=M