Air Quality Awareness Week (AQAW) 2023 is May 1-5. EPA is partnering with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Weather Service, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Forest Service, U.S. National Park Service, U.S. Department of Energy, and U.S. Department of State, as well as state, local, and tribal agencies to share information with the public about efforts to protect and improve air quality. This week also includes World Asthma Day on Tuesday, May 2nd. The theme for this year is, “Working Together for Clean Air”. Air Quality Awareness Week highlights resources that increase air quality awareness and to encourage people to take action and incorporate air quality knowledge into their daily living. Air Quality Awareness Week also provides an opportunity for people to learn about what causes poor air quality and how people can prepare for and respond to events and environments with poor air quality – not just during the month of May, but year-round!

On a recent evening in northern Utah, engineer Kerry Kelly was driving to an event when a dust cloud swept across the highway, obscuring her view. “This is a road with a 50-mile-per-hour speed limit and visibility dropped to zero,” she says. “There was no forecast that was going to happen, no warning.” Fortunately, she avoided an accident, but others have not been so lucky. A similar dust event in July 2021 caused a 22-vehicle pileup in southwestern Utah, killing eight people.  Airborne dust is a type of “particulate matter” – a general term for microscopic solid and liquid droplets that might contain hundreds of different chemicals. It is generated from many sources, explains Kelly, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Utah and a developer of low-cost tools that measure pollution exposure. Some common culprits of airborne dust include mines and quarries, unpaved roads, agricultural activities, construction sites and parched land. Those particles, while larger than the kind resulting from combustion (such as wildfires), can still be inhaled and drawn deep into the respiratory system. Clouds of dust can irritate eyes, noses and mouths, making it tough for anyone to breathe, but especially those with asthma or other respiratory conditions.  As an unfortunate result of its bowl-like topography, northern Utah is periodically plagued by some of the worst air quality in the nation — and sometimes the world, says Kelly, who served for eight years on Utah’s Air Quality Board, and currently sits on the State Air Quality Policy Advisory Board (providing guidance to the state legislature). The Salt Lake Valley is a scooped-out stretch of land that lies below the 12,000-foot Wasatch Range, where in winter temperature inversions (that’s warm air atop cold air) trap pollution close to the ground.  And in recent decades, “climate change and growing population are exacerbating our region’s degraded air quality,” says Kelly, with hotter, drier conditions causing widespread drought and, on windy days, airborne dust to blanket everything in its path. A half-dozen serious dust events earlier this year – including one that caused burning eyes in Salt Lake City (population: 2.5 million) alarmed residents and local air quality experts. It “was just unheard of, like wow, something has really changed,” Kelly says. That’s why Kelly’s recent work focuses on developing new sensor technology to figure out where dust is coming from, and how it moves. While airborne dust is easy to see during such an event, many dust-prone areas of the United States lack any monitoring for larger-sized particulate pollution. That’s in part due to a lack of robust regulation in rural  areas which, says Kelly, impacts “a lot of underserved and underrepresented communities.”  There’s also a tremendous need for better, more affordable air quality sensors, as current low-cost ones are incapable of capturing the large particles that comprise airborne dust. Kelly is also the co-founder of Tellus Networked Air Quality Sensors, a startup that has received $150,000 in angel investor funding. There, she and colleagues at the University of Utah are now focused on retrofitting a pre-existing air quality sensor, called AirU, with a more powerful optical particle counter. The affordable add-on can capture hefty particles of airborne dust and give researchers an idea of how much of it there is, where it’s coming from, and how big of a health hazard it may be. Kelly and her team test-drove the new equipment during the major dust storms last spring and were pleased with how it measured up against much pricier air monitors.  There is new urgency for communities to be able to measure and track airborne dust. “Now that our Great Salt Lake is drying, the dust is a big concern to us,” says Kelly. This past summer, the lake reached its lowest level since record keeping began 175 years ago. A strain on water resources has disrupted the delicate hydrological system that used to refuel the lake with spring runoff from nearby mountains. Of particular concern is the now-exposed lakebed, whose soil contains arsenic, lead and other dangerous heavy metals from past mining activity. While much of the soil remains locked in a thick crust, the dust is already a significant issue, says Kelly, and wind erosion will continue to worsen the problem. Being able to detect airborne dust that poses danger to public health is critical for Utah and beyond, says Kelly, where her new sensor technology could “have wide-reaching benefits.”

A year after installing about 30 air quality sensors at local schools and community centers, the Chattanooga collaborative behind the pollution detection program learned Thursday it is getting a federal grant to more than triple the number of air sensors to expand the program across Hamilton County. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is awarding $491,171 to the Enterprise Center in Chattanooga for its Chattanooga Leveling Environmental Equity Across Neighborhoods project. The project will add another 130 of the air quality sensors to provide even more real-time, localized data on air particulates and other pollutants to help improve the visibility of air pollution information. Chattanooga was the only Tennessee project included in 132 monitoring programs picked to receive the funding as part of a $53.4 million nationwide initiative to enhance air quality monitoring in underserved and more polluted cities. “These grants will give communities the tools they need to better understand air quality challenges in their neighborhoods,” EPA Regional Administrator Daniel Blackman said in an announcement of the grant recipients. “EPA’s investment in ARP (American Rescue Plan) funding will not only advance the agency’s mobile air monitoring labs and air sensor loan programs but improve the agency’s ability to support communities in need of short-term monitoring and air quality information.” Blackman said the new sensors will provide more granular understanding of air quality across Hamilton County communities that routinely rank at the bottom statewide for asthma, chronic illnesses and hospitalization. Chattanooga was also chosen because of EPB’s communitywide fiber optic network, which allows faster internet service for connections to all of the sensors, which are monitored regularly through the Chattanooga Smart Community Collaborative. The collaboration includes the Enterprise Center, UTC’s Center for Urban Informatics and Progress, EPB and Hamilton County schools. Live data visualization, health information and educational resources will be hosted publicly for residents, and sensor data will be imported into repositories, including Chattanooga’s Open Data Portal for access by citizens, researchers and public health agencies. “As a smart community, Chattanooga relies on data,” Geoff Milliner, chief operating officer for the Enterprise Center, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “Better, more granular data can result in better outcomes, especially when it comes to the environment.” Chattanooga is one of only four cities in a collaborative US Ignite project, funded by the National Science Foundation. The project, begun by researchers at the University of Utah, is bringing a network of approximately 50 fine particulate matter air quality sensors online, creating a live map of air quality conditions across the city for local researchers, citizen scientists, students and other curious residents to utilize. The project began as an effort to better understand the relationship between air pollution and incidence rates of COVID-19. Milliner said the first sensors were tested in early 2021, and the initial network of sensors was operational in November 2021.

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) – With winter comes inversion season, which usually occurs between December and February. The inversion brings bad news: pollutants from burning fuels are trapped near the ground, resulting in poor air quality. As a helpful guide Salt Lake County Health Department recently started a new online map This shows real-time air quality data from air surveillance sensors placed across the county. The map, called AirView, displays readings from two sensor networks: AirU an air quality measurement system from the University of Utah and PurpleAir a Draper-based sensor manufacturer. TELLUS Networked sensor solutions a local environmental health service developing air quality sensors takes all measurements, corrects them based on local conditions and plots these results on the map. “AirView is another tool for people who live, work and visit Salt Lake County to learn about the current air quality in their immediate area so they can make informed decisions about their health and activities,” Corbin said Anderson, head of SLCoHD’s air quality office. “Checking AirView can help you decide whether to avoid driving, wear a particulate filter mask outdoors, or change your furnace filter to improve indoor air quality.” According to the press release, AirView has more sensors than other map visualizations currently available. The dots on AirView represent an attached sensor. Next to the map is a “health alert” color scale, which assigns a color to the dots based on the level of particulate matter (PM2.5) measured at each location. The higher the number on the scale, the more dangerous the air quality becomes. AirVirew currently shows that most Salt Lake County locations have green dots indicating safe air quality. “Information is power, and this will help residents make good decisions to protect their health, and businesses will know when to encourage employees to work from home,” said Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson. “Air quality is something that every family in Salt Lake County is concerned about, and this is a great resource as we head into the winter and inversion months.” Utah is notorious for its poor air quality. The Salt Lake City-Provo-Orem area was recently named the 10th most polluted place in the country state of the air a study of American Lung Association. The Salt Lake City government has unveiled numerous action plans in the past to combat environmental pollution. Utah Health Authorities would like to remind Salt Lake County residents that burning solid fuels is prohibited from November through March, unless the Utah Air Quality Department determines it is an “unrestricted action” day, what can be checked on DEQ’s website. Source