At the end of each session, we will include a section that will focus on air quality. We will try to relate the importances of topics covered in the session to air quality research and/or concerns. Since this first session is just an introduction, we will offer an introduction to air quality.

In the atmospheric sciences, there are basically two main categories of study: rain and no-rain. The "rain" people study storms, hurricanes, blizzards, i.e. all the weather in the troposphere. The "no-rain" people study subjects such as ionization in the upper atmosphere, atmospheric chemistry, or the non-precipitation aspects of meteorology. Air quality is a major field in the "no-rain" area. For your information, we also offer a web-based atmospheric chemistry course.

Air quality deals with everything associated with the quality of the air in our atmosphere. Points of interest include the destruction of stratospheric ozone, the increase and effects of pollutants in all levels of the atmosphere, and the long term changes in pollutant concentrations. The field of air quality study is huge. In the United States there are thousands of researchers working on air quality projects at any given time. Air quality research employs scientists from a broad range of disciplines including physicists, chemists, mathematicians, agricultural experts, as well as meteorologists.

Since changes in the quality of our air may not cause noticeable effects for decades, air quality researchers must focus on possible long term effects of small changes in, say, ozone concentrations. A major problem is that since there is so few data about the upper atmosphere and how all of the pollutants react there, it is difficult to hypothesize how all these pollutants really interact, what effects they cause, and whether or not the effects are truly detrimental. This is a problem many researchers compare to fishing in an ocean with only a dozen fish.

One of the major recent focuses in the air quality community is the Environmental Protection Agency's recent list of cities in the nation that have unacceptable amounts of pollution. These cities have been listed as non-attainment areas -- they have not attained an acceptable quality of air based on EPA's National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). You can view EPA's recent non-attainment list as well as a table of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) on-line from EPA. Atmospheric and air quality modelers have been working steadily for several years to try and determine how pollutant concentrations will change in these non-attainment areas in the future,from the next day to the next few decades. Again, the difficulty is creating models that can accurately predict those changes.

These are the basics of air quality. Meteorology is an important background for any effective air quality expert since the change of the weather and the dynamics of the atmosphere greatly affect the movement of pollution. In session 1, for example we discuss temperature inversions. These inversions often occur early in the morning and trap pollutants near the surface. That is why the sky often looks hazy in the early morning in urban areas. Such examples will be given as applications of meteorology to the air quality field throughout this course.

On to Session 1 Questions

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