by Kasha Patel who edits and reports on the weather, climate and environment for the Capital Weather Gang at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she covered Earth sciences and satellite research for NASA.
In 2019, they found 0.001 percent of the global population is exposed to levels of PM 2.5 pollution that the World Health Organization deems safe. The agency has said annual concentrations higher than 5 micrograms per cubic meter are hazardous.
A recent article by EOS writer Jackie Rocheleau highlights a growing concern about wildfire smoke and other pollutants that continue to exist in a diluted quantity within our atmosphere. With wildfires growing in size and quantity due to climate change, the original idea that simply waiting for the pollutants to disperse would be enough to protect human health, is coming into question.
Work out in polluted air and you may miss out on some of the brain benefits of exercise, according to two, large-scale new studies of exercise, air quality and brain health...
The Air Quality Monitoring Team (AQMT) at UC Davis has operated the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) ambient speciated particulate monitoring network since its inception in 1988. Beginning in 2015, AQMT took on the laboratory analysis and data handling for the Chemical Speciation Network (CSN). These two networks encompass over 300 sites delivering over 60 PM2.5 species across the country every third day.
In the narrative of the “Tragedy of the Commons”,(1,2) a shared grazing area (aka common pool resource(3)) is trampled into overgrazed ruin by a pervasion of actors who exploit the resource more quickly than can be sustainably allotted. Regardless of whether there is consciousness of guilt, this is theft.
Air Quality Research Center's, Sean Raffuse has been working on a team at NASA developing smoke and fire models. A recently published article quoted below shares his work over the past few years.
Ann M. Dillner, Associate Director of Analytical Research, contributed to a recently published study on biomass burning particulate emissions.
Particulate matter (PM) affects visibility, climate, and public health. Organic matter (OM), a uniquely complex portion of PM, can make up more than half of total atmospheric fine PM mass.
Year after year California has seen some of the largest and most deadly wildfires, not only by acreage burned, but by also by hazardous air quality. The smoke has turned some cities in neighboring state’s air quality into the dirties in the world, including outside of the state.
New research from Xiaolu Zhang, Krystyna Trzepla, Warren White, Sean Raffuse, and Nicole Pauly Hyslop
Thermal–optical analysis (TOA) is a class of methods widely used for determining organic carbon (OC) and elemental carbon (EC) in atmospheric aerosols collected on filters. Results from TOA vary not only with differences in operating protocols for the analysis, but also with details of the instrumentation with which a given protocol is carried out.
Roy Harrison, a researcher and professor at the University of Birmingham, UK, recently conducted a study to review the reductions in PM 2.5 and NO2 levels that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns over 11 cities. Harrison applied machine learning techniques to remove the effects of weather on the gaseous concentrations to see how the air quality had truly changed due to the lockdowns.
It’s widely known through the Air Quality Research Center that outdoor air pollution leads to untimely deaths throughout the world, however, a recent publication by Dr. Erwan Monier, Associate Professor of Climate Change Impacts in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, and associates demonstrated that many of these deaths are a result of cross-state air pollution.
A recent collaborative study between Harvard and UC Davis produced data backing the notion that nanoparticles (NP) more frequently crossed the air-blood lung barrier to the rest of the body in infant rats than adults. Fascinatingly, this higher permeability demonstrates immature lungs do not follow the same directives as mature lungs.
At the 2018 American Thoracic Society International Conference, UC Davis researcher, Dr. Laura Van Winkleand Dr. Kent Pinkerton participated in a cross-disciplinary evaluation of the evidence gathered over 30 years concerning the potential for outdoor air pollution to contribute to the onset of new airway disease.
