Air Pollution

Things related to air pollution from large industrial sources of pollution.

NPR

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New air pollution satellite could support environmental justice : NPR

David Jones dusts his house in the Curtis Bay neighborhood of Baltimore almost daily. He rarely opens his windows, even when the weather is beautiful, because the outdoor air makes him feel sick.

Immediately across the street is the Curtis Bay coal terminal, where heaps of coal taller than Jones' house are piled up for overseas shipment. Dust from the coal mounds enters people's cars, homes — and lungs.

"You wake up in the morning and your throat hurts," Jones says. In the bathroom sink, he can see black specks in his spit.

Jones is one of millions of people in the United States who live with dangerous air pollution, including gases like nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, ground-level ozone and tiny particulates that coat every surface. Some particles are so small they worm deep into the lungs and cross into the brain.

Process and Display Data from Air Quality Sensors • AirSensor

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Process and Display Data from Air Quality Sensors • AirSensor

The AirSensor R package is being developed to help air quality analysts, scientists and interested members of the public more easily work with air quality data from consumer-grade air quality sensors. Initial focus is on PM2.5 measurements from sensors produced by PurpleAir.

The package makes it easier to obtain data, perform analyses and create visualizations. It includes functionality to:

download and easily work with PM2.5 data from PurpleAir visualize raw “engineering-level” data from a PurpleAir sensor visualize data quality using built-in analytics and plots aggregate raw data onto an hourly axis create interactive maps and time series plots convert aggregated PurpleAir data into ws_monitor objects appropriate for use with the PWFSLSmoke package

Opinion | As Canadian Smoke Darkens the New York Sky, The Future is Clear – The New York Times

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Opinion | As Canadian Smoke Darkens the New York Sky, The Future is Clear – The New York Times

My father, who died of lung cancer, used to say that as soon as people inhaled their first cigarette, they immediately knew, if they weren’t in denial, that they were harming themselves.

I felt the same way on Tuesday in New York, my eyes itching and my nose burning and the taste in my throat like I’d swallowed a charcoal bonbon. This had to be bad. The sky wasn’t quite the apocalyptic orange of Australia’s Black Summer or San Francisco’s Day the Sun Didn’t Rise, but it had grown confrontationally eerie, enveloping the city in a blanket of toxic smog.

Until now, if people in the green and leafy Northeast looked at arid Western cities covered in smoke from wildfires, they could say, that can’t happen here, thank God. On Tuesday, it did: For a moment, New York’s air quality was worse than it was in Delhi, the infamous pollution capital where average life spans are reduced more than nine years by particulates in the air. By evening, New York had registered the worst air quality in the world among major cities. And staying indoors may not provide perfect protection.

While winds are fickle, and it can be hard to predict where smoke will travel in the days and weeks ahead, there isn’t any reason to think the Canadian fires coughing this smoke up into the atmosphere will be stopping anytime soon.