Tips to Improve Air Quality during a Heat Wave

[linda]

• Using public transit and carpooling to reduce vehicle trips
• Refueling cars at night to prevent escaping gas vapors from getting cooked into smog by sunlight
• Avoiding gas-powered lawn equipment
• Setting air conditioning thermostats a few degrees higher to help reduce the fossil fuel burning needed to power them

[gthurnball]

Another idea is walk or ride a bike whenever possible.

[littlegreenfairy]

There is a big study air quality study under way:

Huge air pollution study under way in California
By JOHN ANTCZAK (AP) – 3 days ago
LOS ANGELES — Instrument-laden aircraft and a research ship equipped to sniff the atmosphere and ocean have joined land-based monitoring stations in a huge field study of air pollution and climate change in California.
The goal of the $20 million state and federal project is to understand the origin of pollutants and greenhouse gases, where they go and what becomes of them as an integrated air-quality and climate-change issue.
"Many chemicals that change climate are also air pollutants and the chemistry that makes them are the same, and the atmosphere doesn't care which issue we are dealing with," said A.R. Ravishankara, chemical sciences director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory.
Called CalNex — shorthand for the nexus between air quality and climate — the study is using about $15 million worth of hardware and expertise from NOAA and $5 million from the state, according to the California Air Resources Board.
"The CalNex project is kind of a pollution researcher's equivalent of a D-Day campaign by land, air and sea," said CARB Chairman Mary D. Nichols.
Years in planning, the effort is employing a four-engine NOAA WP-3D Orion aircraft — best known as a "hurricane hunter" — three smaller twin-engine planes and the 274-foot research vessel Atlantis from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.
Two land-based "super sites" for air monitoring have been set up at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and at Arvin in the southern end of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley.
"It's a humongous amount of expertise and instrumentation that have been brought to a focus on California," Ravishankara said in an interview in the Port of Los Angeles, where Atlantis was about to set out to sea for a run up the coast to work in San Francisco Bay and along Northern California.
Atlantis has been outfitted with an air-intake snout on a boom near the bow that feeds samples of the atmosphere to equipment-jammed laboratories in cargo-style containers. A float device with an aerator can be lowered over the side to capture minute particles released into the atmosphere as bubbles break, simulating what happens naturally all over the world every time the wind whips up a whitecap or a wave breaks.
The ship's scientists have worked off Southern California and in the port for two weeks, sometimes with the WP-3D, said the chief scientist, Patricia A. Quinn of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.
Emissions from well over 300 ships have been measured, and in one focus study aided by the Danish shipping line Maersk, the WP-3D sampled emissions from an arriving ship while it was still well out at sea then again after it switched to low-sulfur fuel within 25 miles of the port, Quinn said.
Another coordinated study with the aircraft looked at how pollutants get mixed up with clouds and affect their lifetime and extent. Instruments looked up at the clouds from the surface while the aircraft flew below, through and above them.
"We've also been really fortunate in seeing several instances of outflow at nighttime as the pollutants come offshore, mix with the marine air and get transformed into something different and then pushed back on shore," Quinn said.
The Air Resources Board believes the study's data will help it evaluate emission trends and develop methods for evaluating the effectiveness of various strategies as it seeks to comply with federal clean air standards.
Nichols cited examples of pragmatic questions facing the agency.
"We need to know why some of the measures we've been taking to reduce ground-level ozone aren't working as well in the San Joaquin Valley as well as they do in Los Angeles," she said. "We're looking for ways to actually verify that the forests that we're trying to set aside to offset industrial greenhouse gas emissions really are capturing and storing carbon as promised."

[slucas]

Here is article about Chinese attempts (with US help) to monitor air pollution:

Real-time air quality monitor launches in Shanghai

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has teamed up with a Chinese environmental bureau to provide real-time air quality monitoring from the site of the World Expo in Shanghai.

According to The Associated Press, EPA officials said the move will help the city as it works with other areas in the region to clear its often thick blanket of smog.

The online system, dubbed AIRNow International, links technology developed by the EPA with the existing air quality monitoring network in Shanghai, a city of about 20 million.

“There’s a real power in real-time data. Once you make data available hourly, you can forecast and people start paying attention,” said Jeff Clark of the EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards.

The expo-based monitoring system in Shanghai monitors PM10, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide.

The agency provided technical help to Shanghai’s Environmental Protection Bureau. The two sides also are collaborating on reducing emissions from vehicles and power plants, and on climate change, water pollution and other environmental concerns.

But cleaning up the city is only half the battle, since Shanghai lies downwind of heavily industrialized regions further inland. At times, farm fields in neighboring provinces are burned to clear stubble, leaving the city enveloped in a mucky haze.

“One key thing that has changed is the understanding that pollution is not a city-specific problem. They are reaching out to surrounding provinces to share data, similar to what we did in the United States,” said EPA official Dale Evarts.

The EPA’s AIRNow national index for reporting daily air quality was launched 11 years ago and provides information for nearly 400 U.S. cities.