Tag: PM 2.5

Post #1994: East Coast forest fire smoke. Again?

 

Update 7/26/2024:  Well, this is a puzzler.  Maybe I have mistaken some massive local fire for a plume of remote wildfire smoke. 

As of 2 PM today, it’s back, and worse.  Very strong smell of smoke, PM 2.5 readings in excess of 100 (in whatever units that is) in my yard, and the haze is visible when I look down the street. 

And yet, official AQI readings for my area don’t show anything out-of-line.  There are no reported wildfires near my home. I don’t hear any fire trucks.

In any case, the only thing I’m sure of is that the air in my neighborhood is smoky.  By sight, by smell, and confirmed by a reasonably-accurate PM 2.5 meter.  Either a house is burning down somewhere upwind of Vienna, VA, or we’re back to breathing forest fire smoke.  We’ve had more than enough rain in the past few days to suppress any sort of local massive wildfires.

I have no idea why the only coverage I can find, of this most recent forest fire smoke plume, is in the New York Times.  Perhaps I have mistaken some local source of smoke for a national issue.  But a PM 2.5 reading of 100, visible haze, and noticeable smell all add up to some materially unhealthful air.

Original post follows:

Yep.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed that it smelled like burning wood outside.

As did my wife.

Uh, notice the smell, that is.

I then went through a routine of checking my local Air Quality Index (AQI), which was in fact unhealthy due to high levels of PM 2.5 (particulates).

Then went to the map (above, from the NY Times), to see that, sure enough, I was smelling some “light” smoke from forest fires in the Pacific Northwest.

Maybe I never much noticed this in years gone by.  Maybe.  But the trend for U.S. annual wildfires is clearly pointing up.

Source:  National Interagency Fire Center.

Normally, I’d blather on about global warming.  And, for sure, increased incidence of forest fires is a likely outcome of that.  And yet, I think we’re still waaay too early in the game for this to be driven by climate change. 

And, indirectly, the U.S. EPA seems to agree.  While they show the same trend that I showed above, they attribute it to cyclical climate factors that have led to a drying-out of U.S. western forest lands (reference EPA).  (I read “cyclical” to mean that those factors are expected to reverse.)  Though, obviously a general warming trend doesn’t help, even if the U.S. has seen only a slight degree of warming so far.

I’d say that the (sketchy) Canadian wildfire data seems to back that up.  To a degree.  If you include the period just prior to that shown above, the Canadian data show no strong upward trend.  At least, not  if you exclude that record 2023 season.

Source:  Natural Resources Canada.

In any case, I invite you to fill in your favorite rationale for this strong recent upward trend in U.S. wildfires, as long as you find some way to blame the libs/eco-freaks for it.  Including those wily Canadians.

Here’s the odd thing from this most recent experience:  These smoke plumes appear to have highly variable density at ground level.  Even after traveling across the country.

I really shouldn’t have been able to smell “light” smoke, from 3000 miles away.  But at that time, my PM 2.5 meter showed almost three times the particulate level outside, as did various on-line AQI sites.

I believe that these smoke plumes have that much small-scale variability in them, even after crossing the country.  They are a lumpy amalgamation of smoke, not a uniformly-dispersed smoke.  This is among the many things that makes predictions of daily smoke hazards, from remote forest fires, difficult.  My AQI forecast seems nowhere near as accurate as (say) the rain or temperature forecast, during wildfire season.

It was just last year that the air in New York was orange, for several days running, from Canadian forest fire smoke. And was merely hazardous to breathe, for a few more.  Both the data and my hazy recollection say that this is a new phenomenon.

No matter how you slice it, and no matter whom you blame for it, poor air quality from remote wildfire smoke appears to be the East Coast summertime normal now.

Post #1803: Why are fine particulates (PM 2.5) so variable? It’s over my head.

 

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?

Trying to understand how air mixes — a fool’s errand.

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 Hawaii wasn’t just a nice place to hang out.

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.

Post #1803: What’s normal for PM 2.5 in my area?

 

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?

Post #1802: How good is my car’s interior (cabin) air filter?

 

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?

Post #1800: Not the smokiest month on record for Fairfax County, VA

 

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.

 

Long-term trend toward cleaner air

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.

But August was always hazy, hot, and humid.

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.

Plot the worst day in each month.

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.

Summary:  We’re just having a series of bad days.

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.

Post #1794: Why filtering forest fire soot is not the same as filtering aerosol droplets.

 

I learned a lot about air filtration during the recent pandemic.  At some point, I wrote down and compared all the different standards used for air filtration.  For example, what does HEPA actually mean, and how does it compare to the various members of the MERV clan?  And how do all of those relate to N95? (Post 593, April 1, 2020).

The problem-du-jour isn’t about filtering tiny little viruses out of the air.  Instead, it’s about filtering tiny little soot particles out of the air.  In the U.S. Northeast, we’re now in an era of Canadian wildfires and the resulting air pollution alerts.

Nicely enough, I get to re-use what I think I already know about air filtration.  The knowledge that applied to filtering aerosol droplets (droplets less than 5 microns in size) applies equally to filtering fine particulates such as the soot from wildfires.  This soot typically falls into the PM 2.5 air pollution category, that is, any particulate matter in the air less than 2.5 microns in size.  (For comparison, a human hair is typically around 70 microns thick.)

Except that there is one key difference between filtering the air for pandemic purposes, and filtering the air for forest fire purposes:  Outdoor air is no longer our friend.  In fact, outdoor air is now the enemy.

When filtering viruses, outdoor air could be assumed to be clean.  The likely concentration of virus droplets in outdoor air was typically negligible.  Disease transmission in outdoor settings was virtually unheard-of.  You only had to worry about the “pollution” that you generated inside the indoor space.

But for forest fires, the entire problem IS the outdoor air.  In some sense, the entire battle to keep indoor air breathable is about dealing with the dirty air outside.

To crystalize this, recall that one standard suggestion for improving the COVID safety of (e.g.) schools and other spaces was to open the windows.  Perfectly rational if you’re dodging COVID.  Not so smart if you’re trying to avoid forest fire smoke.  So, from the get-go, you now see that dealing with forest fire smoke is a completely different engineering challenge from minimizing aerosolized COVID. 

Why does this matter?  Outside air is always leaking into indoor spaces.  For the virus filtering, that was a good thing.  Now it’s not, and you need to strategize your air filtration accordingly.  Why?  Because outdoor air doesn’t just leak into indoor spaces, it typically pours in.  The minimum standard for houses, from a health standpoint, is that outdoor air should replace indoor air at least once every three hours (reference).  But a typical well-constructed older home, in good shape (storm windows, caulked) would exchange all the indoor air with outdoor air once per hour (random reference).  Leakier construction (no storm windows, caulk missing) would experience air exchanges more rapid than that.

Whatever air filtration setup you use, you now need to account for that.

My particular problem.

My daughter lives in New York City.  Shown above, New York just had a bout of extremely bad air quality, due to Canadian forest fires.  At the peak, PM 2.5 (particular matter 2.5 microns or smaller) reached 460 micrograms per cubic meter.  This is way beyond what the EPA considers hazardous, and is maybe 10 to 20 times the typical value for that area.

Given that those fires continue to burn, I’m guessing this isn’t a one-and-done.

So I wanted to get her an effective air purifier for her apartment.  (And even if forest fire soot does not return, a New York City apartment would probably benefit from having an air purifier).

My options were to go with a redneck air purifier (20″ box fan, and a high-quality electrostatic air filter), or to buy a purpose-made room-sized HEPA air purifier.   The redneck air purifier is a variation on the “Corsi box”, a D-I-Y air purifier that was promoted as an easy fix for indoor air filtration during the pandemic.

You might normally say that HEPA must be better, because it’s a higher filtration standard.  In theory, HEPA filters must remove 99.97% of fine particulates in a single pass (based on the Wikipedia entry for HEPA).  In practice, I think 99.5% is more typically advertised.  Whereas a high-end air filter (in this case, Filtrete 1900) only removes about 65% of fine particulates in a single pass.  Seems like the case for HEPA is a no-brainer.

And if I were trying to filter the air in a hermetically-sealed box, HEPA probably is the better choice.  The only drawback to HEPA is the back-pressure of doing that high level of filtration limits air flow, for a given power input.  HEPA units advertised as “room-sized” air cleaners typically filter just a few hundred cubic feet of air per minute.  By contrast, the entire selling point of the 3M Filtrete electrostatic filters is that they achieve a reasonable degree of fine-particle filtering with minimal back pressure.  With a box fan on low, I can push 1000 cubic feet of air per minute, through a Filtrete filter.

My gut tells me that, for older construction, with a lot of air infiltration, the cheap setup (box fan and filter) is better than the equivalent purpose-built HEPA air filtration unit. A typical room-sized HEPA unit isn’t going to be able to “keep up with” the inflow of dirty outside air.  Or, at least, not as well as the high-air-flow fan-and-filter setup.  If a lot of air is flowing into the room, my gut tells me that that HEPA (high-filtration/low-volume) actually does a worse job than box-fan-and-filter (low-filtration/high-volume).

Many mathematical paths to the sea.

At some level, I realize that I’m trying to solve a classic calculus problem.  Typically, it’s a water tank with inputs and outputs.  Here, it’s a room with leaks and a filter.  There must be a classic closed-form solution that would tell me the final concentration of particulates in the air. Just plug in the parameters, and view the output.

Somewhere along the line, I have lost the ability to cast a problem such as this into that classic format.  No problem.   Much of what used to require actual intelligence and insight can now be done with brute-force computing power.

In this case, all I need to do is the simple numerical simulation, in a spreadsheet.  Start with a room full of dirty air, with a known rate of infiltration of outside air.  Turn on an air cleaner with known properties.  And just do the accounting, minute-by-minute.  Air in, air cleaned, air out.  And track the resulting concentration of pollutants in the air.

Does anybody ever care about the details of methodology?

Answer:  Only if they disagree with the results.  By contrast, if I end up saying something you agree with, you won’t care how I arrived at that.  That’s just human nature.  People just want to say Amen and move on.

My redneck air purifier consists of a box fan pushing 1000 CFM (on low), through a 3M Filtrete (r) filter.  The Filtrete is a 3M “1900”, rated at MERV 13.  It grabs 65% of the PM 2.5-sized particles with each pass, and about 95% of PM 10-sized particles.  For this simulation, I’m only tracking PM 2.5.

B

The only practical detail you should care about is that if you do this — a single filter stuck on the back of a fan — you must use a low-back-pressure electrostatic filter.  Otherwise, if you want to use el-cheapo MERV 13 filters, you need to go to the trouble of actually constructing a literal Corsi box, using four filters taped together.  That’s because with cheap filters, you need all that surface area to avoid the high back pressure that would starve the fan of air.  See this reference for Corsi box.  Even with that, my take on it is that it provides slower air movement than using a single Filtrete 1900 placed on the back of a fan.

Below is a literal Corsi box, via Wikipedia.  If you use cheap filters, go that route.

By contrast,  my theoretical HEPA filter pushes 100 CFM through a filter that grabs (say) 99.5% of PM 2.5 particles.  (Separately, I’ll show the results for a filter pushing higher rates of air flow).

The room is 20′ x 20′, with an 8′ ceiling, and has one full air exchange per hour, typical for sound older construction.  That is, enough outside air enter the room through various leaks and cracks that it would be enough to replace the air in the room once per hour.

The outside air is at 450 micrograms per cubic meter of PM 2.5, the peak of the air pollution in the New York City area.

Based on this, I’ve written the spreadsheet that does the accounting.  Air in, air purified, air out.

Results.

The results of my Excel-based numerical simulation validate what my gut was telling me.  Due to the high rate of air infiltration typical in older construction, filtering the air rapidly is far more important that filtering the air extremely well.

On the left, you see the results for my redneck, box-fan-plus-Filtrete air filtration unit.  It passes 1000 cubic feet per minute, but only filters out 65% of the finest (PM 2.5) particles.  On the right, you see the results for a slower HEPA unit.  It passes one-tenth of the air per minute, but it filters it more than 10x better.

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.

To get the HEPA filter to work almost as well as the simple Filtrete (r) 1900 plus box fan, in this typical leaky room, you’d have to crank it up to a much higher air-volume throughput.

A HEPA filter is a beautiful device.  It would work wonderfully in a hermetically-sealed room.  But in an actual room, with high-volume exchange of air between inside and exterior, it just can’t keep up.  You’re better off using a cheap box fan on low (1000  CFM) and a low-back-pressure air electostatic air filter, such as a 3M Filtrete (r) filter.

Is this a fair comparison?  Judging from what I see on Amazon, I’d say so.  When they even bother to show the approximate air flow rate, HEPA units offered as whole-room units typically run at:

Whereas the box-fan-and-filter turns over the air in my example room about 20 times per hour, at roughly 1000 cubic feet per minute.

Further, it makes almost no difference whether I use 99.5% efficiency or 99.9% efficiency for the HEPA unit.  At slow rates of air turnover, the HEPA filter gets overwhelmed by the infiltration of outside air.

Conclusion

I just sent my daughter two Filtrete 1900 filters.  Plus, oxymoronically, a stylish 20″ box fan.  Hoping that on low, the fan will be quiet enough not to be bothersome.

My final finding is that the folks who run Amazon don’t miss a trick.  If you search for a stylish box fan, Amazon suggests a few packs of MERV-13 filters, as an add-on purchase.

My conclusion from the above is that, between viruses and soot, a whole lot of people have figured out that the best and cheapest way to filter indoor air is with some form of “Corsi box”.  So these days, as soon as you pick your fan, Amazon is right there, suggesting the add-ons you need to do that.

Post #1793: Breathing the air is like smoking ___ cigarettes a day.

 

I read an interesting comment in a NY Times article today, the gist of which is that breathing the recent smoky air, at its peak, was like smoking six cigarettes a day.

And I thought to myself a) sounds like somebody made that up, and b) is that even remotely close to being true?

Short answer:  No, not even close. At least, not if you’re just tallying up the total weight of particulates inhaled.  See the last section.

Part of the ambiguity in this question is whether you’re simply talking about the total weight of particulate matter inhaled — a fairly direct calculation — or whether you are trying to infer the net impact on health, from those particles — a far less clear calculation.

Virtually every estimate you will read, comparing air pollution to cigarette smoking, is an indirect estimate that tries to compare them based on presumed effect on health.  Typically, those are based on the observed relationship between cigarette smoking and lifespan, compared to the observed relationship between air pollution and lifespan.  Essentially, those are based on comparisons of epidemiological studies.

Just to be clear, those indirect estimates based on health effects appear to show a vastly higher equivalence between air pollution and cigarette smoking.  That is, they make the claim that routine levels of air pollution are the equivalent of smoking several cigarettes a day.  That’s much higher than you would get, simply calculating the weight of particles inhaled from air pollution, versus from smoking.

I address that at the end of this post.

For now, I just want estimates of the total weight of particles.  What weight would have been breathed in, in 24 hours of New York City’s worst air.  And how much do you inhale, if you smoke a cigarette?

If you do the math, you’ll find that spending 24 hours in the worst of NY City’s recent bad air meant inhaling the same quantity of particulates you’d get from smoking about one cigarette.

By contrast, commonly-used air-pollution-to-cigarette equivalences suggest a vastly different far more eye-popping equivalency.  New York’s peak PM 2.5 reading of 460, if maintained for 24 hours, would be roughly the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes, using the commonly-cited Berkeley Earth estimate that 22 micrograms/cubic meter PM 2.5 is the equivalent of one cigarette per day (reference).

Suffice it to say that, as a health economist, I find the method they used to derive that to be subject to some uncertainty.  Just Google air pollution deaths, and you’ll see that even the most basic estimates are all over the map.

So I’m sticking to something far more basic.  What’s the weight of inhaled particles, compared to what you’d get from a single cigarette.

Details follow.

The calculation

Determining the total weight of air pollution particles inhaled is straightforward.  Take the concentration per cubic meter, and multiply by the average number of cubic meters a person breathes in a day.

(This of course ignores the fact that you exhale some of those particles.  So this isn’t the weight that you retain in your body.  It’s just the amount that you inhaled.)

The clear-enough answer here is that 24 hours of breathing the air, at the peak of New York City’s bad air, would have resulted in inhaling about 11 milligrams of total particulate matter.

That’s an estimate for particles of all sizes.  If  you focused narrowly on PM 2.5, it would be about 5 milligrams.

Now for the hard part.  How much particulate matter do you inhale when you smoke a cigarette?

You can get a hint that my answer is going to differ quite a bit from the “health impacts” answers just by looking up the weight of a cigarette.  For reference, a typical cigarette weighs a gram, or 1000 milligrams, per the WHO. Of that, about 15 percent if water (reference).

So the dry organic matter in just one cigarette weighs about 70 times as much as all the particulates of all sizes that would have been inhaled if you lived one entire day at the peak of New York City’s recent air pollution.

The only question is, what part of that weight ends up being inhaled as cigarette smoke?

Estimate 1:  10 to 40 milligrams (cited in this reference).

In short, you would inhale as much particular matter from smoking one cigarette, as you would living for 24 hours at the peak of New York City’s recent smoky air.

To benchmark, an estimate based solely on inhaled weight appears to equate PM 2.5 level of 85 with about 0.3 cigarettes a day (cited by Berkeley Earth).  That would make New York’s peak of 460 equivalent to about 1.6 cigarettes per day.

So, either by my direct calculation, or by reference to a different calculation, the weight of particulates inhaled at the peak of the recent bad air would be in the neighborhood of the dose you’d get from smoking … roughly one cigarette.

Why the big discrepancy?

I’m pretty sure my calculation of the weights of materials is roughly right.  And I’m still pondering the huge difference between the air-pollution-to-cigarette equivalency based on weight of particulates inhaled, and that based on apparent health effects derived from epidemiological studies.

Again, let me emphasize that the commonly-cited Berkeley Earth estimate (based on apparent impact on health) is an order-of-magnitude higher than the simple estimate based on weight of materials.  That shows up here (where the Berkeley-style estimate would be a pack (20 cigarettes) a day, versus my weight-based estimate of one cigarette a day.  And it shows up in Berkeley Earth’s estimate of the impact of air pollution in Beijing, where their estimate was again about an order-of-magnitude higher than an estimate simply based on weigh of particulates inhaled.

Here’s the weird bottom line.  If we assume that both results are right — both the estimate by weight, and the estimate by apparent impact on health — then this probably implies one of two things.

First, if there’s a linear dose-response relationship — if twice as much smoke is twice as bad for you — then this discrepancy would imply that air pollution particulates are vastly more toxic than cigarette smoke.   Roughly speaking, if both estimates are right, a milligram of particulates from air pollution has the same toxicity as 10 milligrams of cigarette smoke.

That does not seem quite plausible, to me.  Possible, sure.  But my understanding is that cigarette smoke is some pretty toxic stuff.  I find it hard to think that (e.g.) burning coal in a power plant (plus smokestack scrubber), or wood in a forest fire, could be that much materially worse than cigarette smoke, where almost all the particulates are the fine PM 2.5 particulates.

Alternatively, we could explain the same results by a declining dose-response relationship.  Cigarette smoking, in the U.S., consists of a small number of adults who get a large daily dose of smoke.  Air pollution particulates, by contrast, consists of everyone getting a small daily dose of smoke.  If the bulk of the health impacts come from that first little bit of smoke … then sure, you could get small amounts of air pollution equaling the health impacts of large amounts of cigarettes.

And, data from cigarette smokers supports that.  Here’s a study of persons who were non-smokers, occasional (non-daily) smokers, and daily smokers.

The occasional smokers consumed just 8% as much tobacco as the daily smokers.  But with that modest rate of consumption, they incurred almost half as much excess mortality risk.  For smokers, it absolutely is true that most of the health impacts come from just a little bit of smoking.

Stated another way, smoking a pack a day (600 a month) is only about twice as bad for you as smoking about 2 cigarettes a day.

And that, I think, it was explains the big discrepancy between air pollution estimates based on weight of particulates inhaled, and estimates based on presumed health effects of smoking versus air pollution.  As-consumed, it probably is true that the typical milligram of cigarette smoke has much less additional health impact than the additional milligram of PM 2.5 in the air.  But that’s only because once you’ve had your first couple of cigarettes of the day, the damage is done, and the remaining pack or two hardly matters.

(And so, weirdly, if you’d filled in the blank above with 2 cigarettes a day, or you filled it in with 20 cigarettes a day, really, there isn’t much difference between those two answers.  In real, actual, cigarette-smoking terms.  That’s per the table just above.  What you can’t really do, strictly speaking, is to do that equivalency calculation based on simple averages, and expect the results to be meaningful as an expression of actual cigarette smoking.  That’s because the cigarettes-versus-health curve is so strongly non-linear.)

The more I look around on this issue, the more I see that scientists seem to be coming to more-or-less the same conclusion.  The problem with airborne particulates isn’t the occasional peak days, as we just had.  It’s that even low, chronic levels of PM 2.5 in the air can lead to significant negative impact on health, when inhaled over a lifetime.