Air Quality in the U.S. has long been seen as a success story. We’ve typically seen cleaner air even as we use more energy.
“I think a lot of people don't realize that our air is cleaner than really any other country that uses as much energy as we do,” said Dr. Tracey Holloway. “That's because we are driving cleaner cars and getting our electricity from cleaner power plants, and that this is not a hypothetical for the future. This is something we've been doing since 1970.”
The Clean Air Act was created in the 1960s and updated in 1970 to combat a variety of air pollution problems.
UW-Madison Professor Dr. Tracey Holloway has been researching air pollution and how science can improve our understanding of it for more than two decades.
“If you'd asked me five years ago, I would have said that in the United States, air quality is a good news story,” said Holloway. But wildfires are changing that.
Take the Northwoods’ normally great air quality for example.
A monitor in the Forest County Potawatomi Community has been tracking air quality since 2002. The last several years have registered the worst ratings, largely driven by smoke from wildfires in Canada and the Western U.S.
“All across the west we've had year after year that have had very big fire seasons,” said Holloway. “This is changing, I think, how we think about air quality and how we strategize about ways to keep people healthy.”
This decline was highlighted in the recently published State of the Air report by the American Lung Association.
It found nearly half of all Americans live in places that get failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, an increase of 25 million people from the year before.
Forest County got a C grade for High Ozone days, a passing grade for annual particle pollution, and an F grade for 24-hour particle pollution.
“I think that the ALA has highlighted the role of wildfires in making air quality worse across much of the US, and also highlights that even if we're not failing the standards of the EPA, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're breathing a quality air, that just because we're passing, we may not be passing with an A,” said Holloway.
Part of Holloway’s job is seeing how we can use satellites to better track air pollution in many forms.
She’s been leading a NASA team to make satellite data more relevant to air quality for almost 10 years.
“I really think that this is a game changer, because satellites up in space can see the air, even chemicals that we can't see with our eyes, and this is allowing us to understand how smoke plumes travel, like from Canada down to Wisconsin,” said Holloway. “It also helps us see how changes in the cars we drive and the way we make electricity have led to cleaner and cleaner air. The fact that we can see that from space, even in areas that don't have measurements on the ground, it's really incredible.”
Holloway will be talking about how science supports air quality management and how wildfire smoke is changing that at May’s Science on Tap Minocqua.
It’s Thursday, May 1 at 6:30 p.m. at Rocky Reef Brewing Company.
You can also stream it online.
