I’m still struck by how poor the day-ahead smoke forecast is for my area. Via Airnow.gov. Separately, I remain surprised at how quickly the actual AQI can change.
So this is, in effect, an extension of Post #1803. I still have no clue why there is such a high variance. Continue reading Post #1818: Why is our AQI forecasting so bad?
Increasingly, over the past few years, we’ve been hearing some sort of frog or toad calling in mid-summer, in our neighborhood.
This year, we seem to have those amphibians in our back yard, judging from the noise they’re making. Continue reading Post #1806: Frog calling.
One thing I’ve noticed about the AQI for particulates is how variable it is. On any given day, my local hourly estimate from Accuweather will differ significantly from the EPA’s Airnow map. Which, in turn, differs from readings just a few miles away. For example, above, my AQI for particulates (as of 1 PM 7/6/2023 is either 63 (Airnow) or 33 (Accuweather). Or somewhere between.
And readings within a few miles go as low as 13. At the same time, the seemingly accurate meter I just bought shows “9”, sitting on my back screen porch.
At first, I chalked that up to instrumentation. Maybe particulates are hard to measure, and what I’m looking at is more-or-less instrumentation error.
Because, serious, how could the air be so different, just a few miles away? If I were to take some other measure of the atmosphere — temperature, humidity, pressure — it would vary smoothly over vast areas. E.g., if it’s 90 degrees here in Vienna, VA, there isn’t going to be a pocket of 45 degree air five miles away in the City of Fairfax. Yet you see that sort of apparent PM 2.5 disparity all the time.
So I thought, it must be poor instrumentation. Then I bought a cheap air quality meter, noted above. Not only are the readings stable from hour to hour, they are frequently in good agreement with the Accuweather numbers. They clearly respond to ambient conditions in a hurry. (The 4th of July fireworks briefly sent the meter into the “purple” AQI range, consistent with predictions from the Airnow map.) The stated accuracy of the PM 2.5 measurement is +/- 10%. All that, from a device that measures all five of the key air pollutants and costs under $75.
So, this isn’t due to instrumentation error. Or shouldn’t be. You can get reasonably reliable PM 2.5 measurements with a cheap off-the-shelf device.
Maybe my local variation is due to the presence of large local point-sources of PM 2.5. But, to a large degree, we have no large point sources of particulate emissions in this area. Largely because we are almost devoid of industry, in the DC area, and our power plants are (mostly) located outside of the metro area.
Which also matches my observation, because it’s not as if one area is consistently dirty. It’s that the readings consistently vary a lot from place-to-place in this region.
So why do the PM2.5 readings in my area appear to be so highly localized? Is there really that little mixing of the air between PM2.5 emitters, and local air?
After about an hour of looking, I’m going to say that short of getting a graduate degree in atmospheric science, this ain’t gonna happen.
It’s surprisingly complicated, but the joker in the deck is “turbulent mixing”? Once I found out about that, I realized it was time to call it quits on trying to understand this.
First, physicists distinguish “bulk flow” (e.g., a breeze) from “diffusion processes” (molecules or particles moving through still air). In this case, the latter would be the movement of water molecules or fine particulates through still air.
So, smoke spreads out because it 1) blows smoothly downwind, and because 2) the particles diffuse outward into surrounding clean air.
That said, it also spreads due to 3) turbulent mixing. Any time the flow of air is not smooth (laminar, or layered), turbulent mixing is said to occur. This sort of mixing can apparently distribute that smoke fully and more-or-less uniformly in the adjacent clean air.
Turbulent mixing occurs a lot in the atmosphere. I’m pretty sure that it occurs at the level at which clouds form above the ground. It occurs within clouds. I occurs if sufficiently strong wind sweeps past fixed objects, e.g., tree branches. And so on. Anything sufficient energetic will kick the flow of the atmosphere from laminar flow to turbulent flow and turbulent mixing.
The bottom line is that there is no back-of-the-envelope way to determine how well PM 2.5 (including smoke) typically mixes into the surrounding atmosphere. In the end, it’s all empirical, and depends on how hard the wind is blowing horizontally, how turbulent the atmosphere is in vertical profile, and so on.
Presumably, both water vapor and PM 2.5 move at the same speed, and mix at the same rate, when it comes to bulk transport and to turbulent mixing. In both those cases, they are merely being carried along by the surrounding air.
But PM 2.5 diffuses a lot less rapidly than (say) water vapor. A theoretical rule (via Einstein and Stokes) is that rate of diffusion is inversely proportional to the radius of the particle trying to diffuse. Getting hold of some data (but not showing the calculation), that suggest that PM 2.5 diffuses about a thousand times more slowly than water vapor.
Diameter of a water molecule seems to be given as 2.75 Angstrom, where an Angstrom is 1/(10^10) meters. Ah, round down to 2.5. But PM 2.5 is in microns, or 1/(10^6) meters. This means PM2.5 particle is about 10^4 = 1000 times larger than a water molecule. Thus under this simple theory, water (humidity) diffuses through still air roughly a thousand times faster than a PM 2.5 particle would.
At the end of the day, I have no clue whether that matters or not, with regard to widely varying PM 2.5 readings across my area.
All I know is that even without big local point-sources of PM 2.5, it’s common to see big difference in (what appears to be) actual PM 2.5, across different locations in my area. Whereas for other parameters of the atmosphere — temperature, pressure, humidity — true local variation in those quantities is tiny.
Seems kind of crazy to worry about it, but there has to be some good reason why this aspect of the atmosphere is so qualitatively different from others.
Maybe my only clue comes from the Keeling curve (above) and how that is measured. When Keeling started measuring atmospheric C02 in the late 1950s, he established his laboratory on the windward side of Mauna Loa.
And found average atmospheric C02 around 315 PPM. Currently, it’s around 422 PPM.
But the point is why he chose that locale. His goal was to get “well mixed” atmospheric gasses, and, apparently, having circa 6000 (?) miles of open ocean to windward was just the ticket for getting that.
By contrast, you can frequently find city air with C02 levels in the 1000-PPM range, near congested roads (reference). That air hadn’t had a chance to get mixed with the rest of the atmosphere.
So, maybe Keeling located there for some reason other than it’s being a nice place. Maybe you really need that much distance to ensure uniform mixing. And maybe the mere 500 miles or so between me and the nearest Canadian mega-fire isn’t enough to ensure uniform mixing of the air.
So I’m guessing that the atmosphere doesn’t mix all that uniformly. For whatever reason. And that the small-area variation in PM 2.5 is true. And that I should not expect it to get any smaller as the summer progresses.
As a gardener, I try to keep an eye on the thievin’ varmints wonderful creatures of nature passing through my back yard.
As a retiree, I have nothing better to do.
But my eyesight ain’t what it used to be.
Keep that in mind when I say that I’m fairly sure I saw my first backyard coyote yesterday.
The pictures you might typically see — making the coyote look like some noble offshoot of the wolf — don’t match reality of the eastern Coyote. Around here, if you see something about the size of an adult fox, but without the good looks, chance are, that’s a coyote. If you see an ugly brown dog with a mottled coat and a long tail, not acting like a domesticated dog, chances are good that you’ve spotted an eastern coyote.
This was not unexpected. Coyotes are native to the western U.S., and have been expanding eastward for the better part of a century. The predominant theory is that we invited them in by killing off bigger predators (wolf, bear), and converting forest into open areas.
I got my first-hand introduction to the Eastern coyote about five years ago, camping at Sky Meadows State Park. That sits adjacent to the ridge of the Blue Ridge.
Just at dusk, the coyotes had themselves a howl. At first, you hear a few individuals starting it off. You think, oh, cute, that must be a coyote. A minute later the entire ridge is ringing with the sound of howling coyotes. Three minutes later they wind it down, and silence returns.
It was chilling. There aren’t a few coyotes in those woods. Like bear, or foxes. There were hundreds within earshot of where I was camping. At least by the sound of them.
In short, the Blue Ridge Mountains are infested with coyotes. Given how few bear and foxes there are left, I’m guessing coyotes are now the dominant predator species in this area. That’s a complete change from my youth, where there were no coyotes in this area, period.
And they are here in the ‘burbs. There have been sporadic reports of pets being eaten by coyotes, here in the D.C. area. I think I spotted one crossing a construction site a few years back.
But it’s a different thing entirely to find one eyeballing your back yard. It skedaddled as soon as I opened my back porch door.
I would like to think I’m not the sort of person to form an opinion about animals based on cuteness. For example, I loathe deer, for the destruction they bring. Despite being handsome creatures. Foxes, I like for the fact that they eat squirrels, and not just because they are really elegant-looking beautiful animals.
Eastern coyote? My gut reaction is, one step up from rat. They may be noble wolf-like creatures in the western climate. And most photos you’ll see of them make them look the part. But around here, they look like mangy stray dogs. As in this view, from Wikipedia:
Looks aside, near as I can tell, this newest invasive species brings along only one good attribute: They kill deer.
Better yet, they kill baby deer. More specifically, in many areas, coyotes are the number one cause of death for fawns. (See, e.g., this random reference).
Much of the literature on this topic comes from the deer-hunting community, which of course tut-tuts over these premature deer losses. The deer hunters have a valid point of view. For them, coyotes are competition. Having eliminated wolves and nearly eliminated bear in this area, the deer hunter is the only native carnivore that’s in competition with the coyote.
By contrast, as a back-yard gardener, I’m am definitely on Team Coyote on this one.
However.
However, coyotes are omnivores. Sure they eat fawns. They also eat poodles. And squirrels. And garbage. And fruits and berries, if there’s nothing else around.
Oh, and they are known to attack small children occasionally. Just thought you might want to know, in case you were still harboring some sympathy for coyotes.
This invasive species is definitely going to put some pressure on our local fox population. And that’s a pity, because the foxes in my neighborhood don’t go around hunting down my neighbor’s cats. Or kids.
So if the coyote succeeds in pushing out foxes, we’ll have replaced a relatively benign and good-looking wild creature with one that’s far more of a nuisance. And ugly to boot. But one that is capable of reducing the deer population.
If Fluffy goes missing out of your backyard any time soon, you’ll know whom to suspect.
Coyotes aren’t advertising their presence. They aren’t howling, here, yet. (I think that’s a large-group activity for them and they aren’t yet that numerous.) They are stealthy, and they are hard to spot. They are easy to mistake for a fox or a stray dog.
But they are here. As in, prowling the suburban back-yards of Vienna VA.
In the grand scheme of ongoing slow-mo environmental apocalypse — (reference insect loss, reference global warming) — I guess this hardly even registers. Just another nuisance invasive species to deal with.
Currently our AQI is a mere 87, for fine particulates (PM 2.5). That’s a relief. Just a normal amount of air pollution.
Or is it? I’ve kind of lost track of what was normal for my area. It’s not like I paid attention to the AQI for most of the past decade.
So here, for Fairfax County, VA, I’m posting a table of AQI statistics, for PM 2.5. based on the period 2010-2022. Just so that I can refer to it as needed. Briefly, only 1% of days exceed the 99th percentile. Half of days exceed the 50th percentile. And so on. Continue reading Post #1803: What’s normal for PM 2.5 in my area?
There’s little in the way of hard data available for car air filters themselves.
That said, the clear consensus of informed opinion is that in newer vehicles, setting the AC to recirculate will remove most of the fine particulates (PM 2.5) from the cabin air in a matter of minutes. Continue reading Post #1802: How good is my car’s interior (cabin) air filter?
This is not a post about obesity. Despite the fact that I have quit exercising on days where the AQI is high.
Instead, it’s about trying to weigh air pollutants. Continue reading Post #1801: Weight gain during air pollution alerts.
Along with much of the eastern U.S, we’re living through another round of air pollution alerts here in Northern Virginia. Best guess seems to be that those Canadian forest fires will be burning for months yet, so this will be occurring sporadically all summer.
I decided to see how the current situation looks, compared to historical air pollution levels in this area. To do that, I downloaded a little over two decades of daily data on fine particulates (PM 2.5) in Fairfax County.
I got some real surprises. Mainly, as high as the PM 2.5 levels have been, this June, that’s not a monthly record. In the 2000s (and presumably earlier) we routinely exceeded the monthly average level of PM 2.5 that we’ve seen in this smoky June 2023. Best guess, that was due to a toxic interaction of air-conditioning and coal-fired electrical generation.
It is exactly as I recall. Summertime air quality in the DC area was always bad. It had only recently gotten materially better. And then, along came these fires.
Details follow.
The EPA allows you to look up historical AQI data, at this website. For Fairfax County, and PM 2.5 (fine particulates), the earliest complete year of data is 2000. So that’s where this analysis starts. (Although the cutoffs for the AQI scale changed over this period, it appears that the website delivers AQI data uniformly using the current cutoffs.)
Source: Analysis of daily data from EPA website cited above.
The air got materially cleaner over this period. That’s clearly visible when I plot the annual average AQI for fine particulates (PM 2.5) from 2000 to June 2023. Back in 2000, the average was a bit over 50. By the time you get to 2015, the average was a bit over 30.
Best guess, around here, that was mostly a consequence of replacing coal with natural gas in our electricity generation mix. In 2000, half the power consumed in Virginia was coal-fired power. By 2020, that had fallen to just 4 percent. Almost certainly, the oldest and dirtiest plants were retired first. But this is also the era when regulation of particulates from diesels went into effect.
Source: Underlying data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
So far so good. But here’s where things turn weird. Let me now plot the same data as monthly averages, from January 2000 to June 2023.
Source: Analysis of daily data from EPA website cited above.
Surprise. Every year, in the 2000s, in the heat of summer, monthly-average particulate levels rose to the level they reached for June 2023.
I didn’t expect that.
I knew that we always had terrible ground-level ozone in the summer, but there are good reasons for that. Ground level ozone forms from the interaction of oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds, acted on by sunlight and heat. We naturally got peak ozone during the peak of the summer season.
But what caused these August peaks in PM 2.5, that somehow was fully-phased-out by 2010 or so, I cannot quite fathom. Because July and August are the peak months for electricity use (in the U.S. and presumably in Virginia), I’m guessing this also has to do with electricity generation and the change in the generation mix of the Virginia grid.
And, by inference, about half the improvement in the yearly averages was due to getting rid of those July-August peaks. You can see that the annual minimums declined from about 40 to about 30, or half the decline in the annual averages.
My only real point is that, two decades ago, every summer, monthly average particulate levels in this area exceeded what they were in June 2023.
When I plot the worst day in each month, then June 2023 finally stands out against the historical background. In the 2000s, we routinely had Code Orange y AQI days for fine particulates (AQI > 100). But we never had a Code Red day, that is, AQI over 150. By the 2010s, Code Orange days had become rare.
In any case, since the start of recordkeeping in 2000, we hadn’t had anything close to the AQI of 198, for particulates, that we saw in June 2023.
So that’s how to characterize this situation around here. We have occasional days with incredibly awful air quality (for particulates), compared to historical averages. But the average for the month isn’t even as bad as it was back in the days of air-conditioners running on coal-fired electricity.
In a nutshell: There is no hard cutoff. More air filtration is better. But there are clearly diminishing returns to buying the ultra-high-end air filters.
The bottom line is that, when it comes to the current air quality alerts, some air filtration is a whole lot better than no air filtration.
With smoke from the Canadian forest fires continuing to generate air pollution alerts in the U.S., my wife suggested that I re-up my articles on using a box fan as an air cleaner.
This is a re-telling of Post #1792 and Post #1794. Refer to those posts if you want more background information.
Point 1: A standard 20″ box fan and a high-end 3M Filtrete HVAC filter together make a simple and effective air cleaner. Get a 3M 1900 filter (rated MERV 13), place it on the back of the fan, and turn the fan on.
The key here is that the 3M electrostatic filters produce little “back pressure” or resistance to air flow. That’s why you can have the low-powered fan draw air through that filter and still have significant air flow.
You can do the same thing with standard high-resistance MERV 13 filters, but you would need to construct a “Corsi Box” to provide enough surface area. That is, tape four together into a hollow box, to provide enough surface area to allow for adequate air flow.
The 3M filters are expensive, but in my experience they last for months. Arguably, this being almost July, you’d only need one for the entire summer.
Point 2: This is more effective than a typical room-sized HEPA filter. The reason is that with heavily-polluted outdoor air, filtering a lot of air reasonably well (fan + filter) beats filtering a small amount of air extremely well (HEPA unit).
Above is the labeling on that Filtrete (r) 1900 filter. In a single pass through the filter, it removes
That’s nowhere near as good as a HEPA filter, which removes on-order-of 99.97% of all such particles in a single pass.
So why does the fan + filter win?
First, outdoor air infiltrates into indoor spaces at a fairly rapid rate. Typical tight older construction has one air exchange per hour. That is, every hour, enough outdoor air enters the building to replace the entire volume of indoor air.
In the current situation, that means smoky outdoor air is more-or-less pouring into your living space, continuously. Even with the windows and doors shut.
Second, a box fan moves a lot more air per minute than a typical room-sized HEPA unit. A box fan on high can move about 2000 cubic feet of air per minute. Depending on the fan, a box fan on low can move on order of 1000 cubic feet per minute. A typical room-sized HEPA unit might move just over 100 cubic feet per minute.
The end result is that the slower HEPA filter can’t keep up with the steady inflow of dirty air. Or, more properly, can’t keep up as well as the fan-and-filter combination.
On the left, you see the results of a numerical simulation of the two types of filtration. Left is the box-and-filter, right is a typical HEPA unit. Horizontal axis is time, vertical axis is the density of particulates in the air. (See prior post for full details of simulation).
The equilibrium level of particulates in the room is vastly lower with the high-volume, lower-efficiency filter (left graph above). Why? Because the slow pace of the HEPA filter (right graph) can’t keep up with the level of outside-air infiltration that is typical in older construction.
Point 3: Availability. As we learned during the pandemic, if there’s a sudden surge in demand (e.g., for N95 respirators), the shelves are soon stripped bare. So if everybody goes out looking for an air cleaning device, those will soon become unobtainable.
As of today, my local Home Depot has well over 100 20″ box fans in stock, on the floor, ready to be purchased. By contrast, they have just five room-sized HEPA units in stock.
Which makes sense. Those fans are commodity items costing about $25 each. The Honeywell HEPA unit, by contrast, goes for just about $300. Home Depot couldn’t afford to keep 100 of those in stock, on the off chance that there might be a run on air cleaners.
Sometimes, simple and cheap is what you want. In this case, a box fan and a 3M 1900 air filter together cost much less than a room-sized HEPA filter. And in this situation — where you are trying to filter pollution arriving from outdoor air — the much higher air flow of the fan-and-filter combination actually works better than a typical HEPA air cleaner.
Nothing prevents you from dealing with this problem by wearing an N95 respirator inside. But note from the simulation above, the fan-and-filter combination provides air that is almost as clean as you would get, breathing through an N95 respirator. So you get almost the full benefit of that, without the hassle of wearing a mask 24/7.
As a bonus, while the mask protects your lungs, the fan-and-filter combination protects both your lungs and your eyes. If eye irritation is an issue for you, filtering the indoor air is the only way to go.
