RMCAB Air Quality Network & IBOCA Alert Phases
The district environment secretariat has run Bogotá's RMCAB network since 1997, today 20 automatic stations measuring PM10, PM2.5, ozone, SO2, NO2, CO, black carbon and weather, reporting hourly to a public portal and mirrored to OpenAQ. Readings feed the IBOCA index, whose five bands a joint environment-and-health resolution fixed in December 2023 — crossing into the orange band puts the city in Alert Phase 1. The threshold has legal force but not automatic force: a standing panel validates the reading first, then the secretariat issues a resolution, as it did on 25 January 2024 for the south-west, restricting solid- and liquid-fuel boilers on weekdays and barring maintenance of emission-control systems. Earlier declarations also restricted cargo vehicles. Peer-reviewed measurements inside TransMilenio buses run far above what the fixed stations record.
📊 Impact
A peer-reviewed analysis of the network's first decade found only five stations held at least 50% valid PM10 data, with most gaps caused by equipment outages rather than unreliable readings. The network has since grown from 14 automatic stations to 20 (operator figure, 2026).
🎓 Lesson
A threshold can carry legal force without carrying automatic force. Bogotá writes its index bands into a resolution, but a validation panel sits between the reading and the restriction — and the restrictions reach boilers and lorries, not the bus interiors where measured exposure is worst.
Sources
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “RMCAB Air Quality Network & IBOCA Alert Phases” — Bogotá, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bogota-rmcab-air-quality/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
🔗 Related projects
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