AIRPACT

Beginning in 2001, LAR has operated an automated numerical air-quality forecasting system to provide daily forecasts of ozone and particulate matter (PM) concentrations for the Pacific Northwest as part of the Air Indicator for Public Access and Community Tracking (AIRPACT). The most recent version, AIRPACT-3, provides daily forecasts for the entirety of Idaho, Oregon and Washington states using a 12-km grid.

For more information on AIRPACT-3, see a slide show of our 2006 presentation at the National Air Quality Conference in San Antonio.

[top]

ClearSky

[top]

To support smoke managers in eastern Washington and northern Idaho in making decisions about the advisability of agricultural field burning with respect to the effect on air quality, LAR has developed an integrated meteorology, emissions, and plume dispersion modeling system (ClearSky) to predict smoke concentrations based on user-defined field-burning scenarios. For more about ClearSky, see our 2006 poster presented at the Workshop on Agricultural Air Quality in Potomac, Maryland.

Satellites & Remote Sensing

LAR has been intimately involved in developing a satellite- based instrument to measure air pollutants remotely. Now deployed on the Aura satellite, the Dutch Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) has global coverage, with a sufficiently fine spatial resolution to track O₃ and NO₂ plumes on urban and regional scales.

LAR faculty, in collaboration with researchers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, are now working to build a prototype instrument that will measure pollutants continu- ously from space with even greater precision than the OMI.

Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI)

The new instrument would be capable of accurately measuring pollution in 1 km x 1 km footprints over an area the size of the Pacific Northwest. The instrumentation will be on a satellite put into geostationary orbit. At 36,000 kilometers above the earth's surface, the satellite will revolve around the Earth at the same rate as the Earth itself rotates, and so will remain stable above one part of the earth, thus allowing continual viewing of a regional urban airshed and surroundings, rather than the snapshots obtained from a standard polar orbiting satellite instrument.

For more about LAR's use of satellite products, see our 2008 National Air Quality Conference poster: "Use of satellite tropospheric products for evaluation and improvement of the AIRPACT-3 air quality forecast system" (Thorpe, et al. 2008).

[top]

In a series of studies funded by EPA through the Washington Dept of Ecology and also the Nez Perce tribe, WSU has conducted measurement campaigns to determine local levels of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). These include sampling from fixed sites on a 1 in 6 day rotation to determine 24 hr average concentrations for a range of volatile organic compound HAPS as well as PM2.5 species. Initially, sampling was conducted in the Seattle urban area at a number of sites and, more recently, in Spokane and the Lewiston-Clarkston area.

For Spokane and Lewiston/Clarkston, field measurements were also collected using a mobile laboratory fitted with a Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometer, a pair of PAH instruments, and other meteorological and pollutant sensors. Together, the data from the fixed site and mobile sampling studies provide a measure of the exposure of urban populations to a wide range of HAPs.

[top]