Asunción's Smoke Season Gets an Open-Source Air Forecast

Proyecto Respira is a collaboration between the engineering faculty of the National University of Asuncion (FIUNA), the open-source community Girls Code Paraguay, Mozilla and Paraguay's environment ministry, led by mechatronics engineer Fernanda Carles. It won a 2024 Mozilla Foundation Open-Source AI for Environmental Justice award and publishes daily AQI forecasts, health advice and sensor statistics through a website, app, and Telegram and X bots. Low-cost sensors across Greater Asuncion are calibrated remotely against a single reference monitor from the US Embassy's AirNow system. During the September 2024 smoke emergency, a Hospital de Clinicas pulmonologist reported respiratory consultations up by as much as 68 percent, the kind of episode the forecasts are designed to warn people about. Its code repositories were updated as recently as October 2026.