My favorite piece from the article is the claim that air quality has improved due to measures such as replacing gas-powered lawn and garden machines with electric ones.
BUELLER, BUELLER. WAKE UP! ITS WINTER AND NOBODY IS RUNNING LAWN AND GARDEN MACHINES WHEN THERE'S A FOOT OF SNOW ON THE GROUND!
That move to electric may help some with summer pollution (although there are still regional emissions from coal plants), but they do nothing for PM2.5 in February. We are also a state that encourages if not promotes continued if not expanded use of fossil fuels, the combustion of which is one of the primary sources of our air quality problems.
The good news is that yesterday's storminess has put a pretty good dent into our latest air pollution event. The air quality on the University of Utah campus is currently good. As of 8 AM, a thin layer of pollution remained, however, along the valley floor with Hawthorne Elementary hanging in the moderate air category at about 20 ug/m3.
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| Source: DAQ |
On my walk to the bus this morning, I also noticed a thicker layer of smog lying over the Great Salt Lake.
Soundings from yesterday afternoon and this morning also showed a shallow cold pool remaining over the valley. We'll have to see if we can crack that with a bit of sun today. I would not be surprised, however, if we see a remnant remain over the lake and push into the northern valley this afternoon. Time will tell, but we're in a much better place today than we were two days ago.
Addendum @ 8:45 AM
I should have used the wonderful map below, created by our MesoWest team using DAQ and MesoWest network observations, showing the PM2.5 distribution at present and the sharp contrast between the upper east bench of the Salt Lake Valley (good air quality) and lower lying areas along the Wasatch Front which have moderate or worse air quality.
This data is available in real time at http://meso2.chpc.utah.edu/aq/. Today provides a prime example of why the Wasatch Front needs a high quality, high density, air-quality monitoring network. The one observation provided by the DAQ in the Salt Lake Valley at Hawthorne Elementary is not representative of the local air quality in many areas of the valley this morning. More on this in our previous post Inversion Snippets from 23 Jan 2013. Note that thanks to the University of Utah, we now have air-quality monitoring equipment on Trax as discussed in that post. Hooray!
Addendum @ 8:45 AM
I should have used the wonderful map below, created by our MesoWest team using DAQ and MesoWest network observations, showing the PM2.5 distribution at present and the sharp contrast between the upper east bench of the Salt Lake Valley (good air quality) and lower lying areas along the Wasatch Front which have moderate or worse air quality.
This data is available in real time at http://meso2.chpc.utah.edu/aq/. Today provides a prime example of why the Wasatch Front needs a high quality, high density, air-quality monitoring network. The one observation provided by the DAQ in the Salt Lake Valley at Hawthorne Elementary is not representative of the local air quality in many areas of the valley this morning. More on this in our previous post Inversion Snippets from 23 Jan 2013. Note that thanks to the University of Utah, we now have air-quality monitoring equipment on Trax as discussed in that post. Hooray!
as of 11:23am fri, airnow shows a 59 AQI.
ReplyDeletethat doesn't look 'good' to me.
Airnow only incorporates the Hawthorne Elementary station. At that site, the air quality this morning was moderate, as noted in the post above. At the University of Utah, it was good when I wrote the post and even now (11:25 AM) we still sit in the good category.
DeleteThis is one of the prime issues of the lack of real-time air quality observations in the valley. The spatial and temporal evolution of air quality in the valley is very poorly represented by the one real-time air quality observation at Hawthorne.
Jim