STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Federal officials will conduct a nationwide air quality monitoring campaign this summer to discern how sources of air pollution have changed in recent decades.
National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA scientists, along with researchers from 21 universities across three countries, will coordinate a wide-spanning apparatus of state-of-the-art instruments to better understand why some forms of pollution have persisted despite reductions in tailpipe and smokestack emissions.
The effort will include multiple major metropolitan areas, including New York City, and eventually be used to improve pollution forecasts and inform decision makers about the most effective ways to slash the presence of pollutants like ozone and particulate matter.
“This is an unprecedented scientific investigation — in scope, scale and sophistication — of an ongoing public health threat that kills people every year,” said NOAA Administrator Dr. Rick Spinrad in a release. “No one agency or university could do anything like this alone.”
Both particle matter, known as PM2.5, and high ozone levels are associated with serious health impacts, including premature death, asthma attacks and cardiovascular harm. A growing body of research has found PM2.5 disproportionately affects minority and low-income populations in the United States.
The presence of those pollutants has been decreasing in New York City in recent years but is still the cause of thousands of annual deaths and billions in health costs. Nationally, around 200 counties fail to meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s 8-hour ozone standard established nearly a decade ago, and more than 60 fail to stay below the threshold for particulate matter.
While fossil fuel emissions were previously the primary source of the compounds responsible for ground-level ozone and particulate pollution, there is a belief a growing proportion of the current air quality issues could be due to products like…
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