Envirometrics Air Quality News & Technical Information

News & Technical Info
Short notes on topics of current interest in air quality are posted on this page. A bibliography of Abstracts and Papers by Envirometrics employees is on the linked page.

Abstracts and Papers published by or presented to professional meetings by Envirometrics employees are listed on the linked page. You can find there papers on Computational Fluid Dynamics, Odor Monitoring and Control, Combustion, Indoor Air Quality, Dispersion Modeling and Environmental Management. Complete copies of some of the papers are available for downloading. Copies of the other papers are available upon request.

News notes provide summaries of technical information on air quality and air pollution control. The following current notes are available:

Finding Air Quality Information on the Internet (updated 1/14/2005)

Combustion Calculations Spreadsheets

Odor Sampling Dilution Spreadsheet

Envirometrics' Staff Receive Awards at 2004 PNWIS Annual Meeting
Maggie Corbin handing Mike Ruby the Robert Stockman Award plaque At the Annual Meeting of Pacific Northwest International Section of the Air and Waste Managment Association in Portland, Oregon on November 5, 2004 J.D. McAlpine and Mike Ruby received an award for the "best presentation" for their paper "Determining the Proper Wind Sensor Height on a Building Using CFD". Mike Ruby also received the Robert Stockman Distinguished Achievement Award "in recognition of an outstanding contribution to air quality management in the PNWIS region and for a long-standing contribution to PNWIS." Robert Stockman was the first Executive Director for the Air Pollution Control Board for the Washington Department of Health, which later was merged into the Department of Ecology, and the first Chairman of PNWIS, serving from 1962 to 1964. Dr. Ruby also received the PNWIS Executive Committee award in 1999.

Finding Air Quality Information on the Internet
The internet is a useful source of information on all sorts of topics, but you have to find it. Search engines can sometimes take you right to what you need, but too often they return a list of hundreds of only marginally related sites. This article is intended to provide a summary of the more useful air quality directory sites (i.e., sites with links to other sites) and sites with air quality information. Click on the linked words to go to the page described. To return to this page click Back on your browser or News on the navigation bar above.

U.S. EPA Perhaps the single most useful site is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency site, despite the sometime difficulty in finding where the particular information you want is located. Spend some time looking around and you will find, for example, an EPA employee locator with phone numbers and addresses, access to EPA regulations, either by publication date in the Federal Register or by CFR citation, and a search engine that will scour through more than 6,000 EPA publications for the key words you enter. The most useful part of the EPA site for air quality information is in the Office of Air and Radiation pages. Here you will find two different (and often not overlapping) pages with documents for recent air quality regulatory actions (Airlinks and OAR); direct links to the web pages of the EPA regional air program offices; information on acid rain programs, visibility programs and indoor air quality; a link to the Office of Mobile Sources pages where you find the models for emissions from motor vehicles; and a link to the Technical Transfer Network (TTN) site.
From the TTN directory you can reach the CHIEF site for emission factors; the EMC site for details on source test methods, even special methods; the SCRAM site for air quality models, modeling information and model ready meteorological data; the Best Available Control Technology (BACT) Clearinghouse; the Clean Air Technology site, with detailed summaries of available control technologies, and other useful sites. A source for information on the next generation of air quality models is the Atmospheric Sciences Modeling Division site.
The Compliance and Enforcement Office provides a database of determinations on PSD, NSPS and other regulation applicability questions. A similar database that you can download and use on your own computer has been assembled by EPA Region 7. Another useful tool for evaluating the applicability of federal rules is found on the Texas air agency website.
Other U.S. Federal Agencies The U.S. National Park Service website provides individual pages describing the air programs at many of the national parks, including gaseous pollutants and visibility monitoring data. The Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. Forest Service maintains a website with air quality data from forest and wilderness areas in the northwest, emissions data for prescribed and wild fires, and extensive information on regulatory requirements for analyzing air quality impacts on the forests.
Western Air Agencies The Washington Dept. of Ecology's website provides realtime access to the state's ambient monitoring network and even photographs of the monitors and their surroundings. A variety of reports and publications are summarized or available for downloading. Most of the air regulations can be downloaded and a listing of recent actions is provided. An expertise directory is provided to help you find the right person to answer your questions.
It also provides links to the web sites of the Washington local air authorities, most of which contain copies of their regulations and staff directories. Several contain excellent teaching resource materials. Local air quality data for Washington and Oregon is available from the Air Watch northwest website. The Southwest Clean Air Agency site has handy lists of the federal Hazardous Air Pollutants and the Washington Toxic Air Polluants (go to the bottom of the page), air quality consultants and source testing firms. The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency website provides detailed information on their Global Climate Change project and links to other global warming websites. The Olympic Clean Air Agency website provides graphical access to toxic emissions inventories for individual sources in its counties.
The Oregon Dept. of Environmental Quality site provides information on its programs, such as details on how to apply for permits. Emission inventory data and other details about permitted sources can be found using a database of Oregon permits. Their air quality rules are available on the State Archives website.
The website of the California Air Resources Board includes a wide variety of useful information, in addition to the usual rules and regulations, air quality data and staff directory. This site also contains their own BACT clearinghouse, a database of toxics emissions factors and information on their Diesel Risk Reduction and alternative fuels programs. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District provides a useful BACT/TBACT database.
The Idaho Division of Air Quality site provides air quality data, copies of permit application forms and the air quality rules.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality pages provide access to information about permits, planning and air quality data.
The Alaska Dept. of Environmental Conservation air quality programs website posts information about permits and regulation changes currently and recently out for review, a downloadable copy of their air regulations and copies of the permits for all major sources in Alaska.
The Water, Air and Climate Change Branch of the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection website has provincial codes, reports and air quality data, including a novel "Odour Index", based on ambient data for total reduced sulfur. The Greater Vancouver Regional District air quality web pages includes copies of their regulations and permits for downloading and links current air quality data for sites in the Fraser River Valley.
The Alberta Environment site provides information on their air quality monitoring network and their guidelines for air quality modeling.
Professional Associations and Journals The Air and Waste Management Association posts information about its upcoming meetings on its website. All the articles from its journals published after 1997 and all meeting and conference papers after 2003 are available for downloading (free to members). A portion of the site that is only available to members includes a directory of A&WMA members and an employment exchange. A consultants and products buyer's guide is also available. The website includes Envirowire, a daily headline service with the latest air quality news and information.
The Pacific Northwest International Section of the A&WMA ( PNWIS) posts information about both section and chapter meetings on its website. Copies of the presentations given to the most recent Annual Meeting and recent specialty meetings are available for downloading.
The Institue of Clean Air Companies provides information on the products of their members and detailed information on the control of mercury.
The American Meteorological Society website has information about its upcoming meetings and provides access to abstracts of all articles in all AMS journals since January, 1997.
The American Chemical Society publications site provides searchable access to the past several years of their many journals. There is no charge to read the abstracts and individual articles can be purchased.
The Water Environment Federation hosts a lively forum on VOC and Odor Control for wastewater treatment plants that will be of interest to air quality professionals.
Online News Services, Magazines General environmental news headlines with summaries of today's stories are available from Reuters, the Environmental News Network, the Environmental News Service and Grist Magazine, which tends toward wry humor mixed with its news.
Earth Vision is more of a magazine, with current news articles, but backed up by more extensive pages of environmental news on business and technology, sustainability, education, policy, or recreation topics. Living on Earth, from National Public Radio, also offers in-depth audio articles on environmental subjects. Pollution Online focuses on the pollution control industry, with news, product announcements and a buyer's guide. Another useful magazine site for industry is the electronic edition of Pollution Engineering. An especially useful feature of this site is the ability to key word search for information from past issues.
Portals and Virtual Libraries Portals are an access point to a wide variety of services and information on the web. One of the most extensive enviromental portals is The Environmental Professional's Homepage. It is an no-graphics, no-nonsense site with indexed pages of direct links to U.S. federal and state environmental agency web sites, federal regulations and legislation, professional association web sites, upcoming conferences and events, and a wide variety of other useful web sites. Another important portal with links to a wide range of sites on air issues is Eco-Portal. This site also provides direct links to current news reports on air pollution, climate change and other atmospheric science topics.
The organization of state and local air pollution control agencies (STAPPA/ALAPCO) website provides links for national, regional and local clean air agencies all over the world and links to hundreds of useful websites on more than 20 air quality issues. Many of the state and local agency sites contain extensive information about air pollution sources and current control options. For example, the Colorado agency website provides extensive guidance on stationary source control options. The Texas and San Diego AQMD websites contain very useful, detailed guidance on applying Best Available Control Technology (BACT). The Tennessee website contains a comprehensive explanation of the toxics MACT and NESHAP rules.
Some of the major search engines also provide annotated lists of useful websites with air quality information. Especially useful are the lists provided by Google, Yahoo and About.
The Science.gov site provides links to many of the federal government websites that report on air quality research. The even more massive Global Change Master Directory, run by NOAA, provides links to an extraodinary volume of atmospheric research data.
Good sites for information about chemicals include the National Institute of Standards Chemical Webook, the EPA IRIS database of toxicological information and the Centers for Disease Control ATSDR Toxicological Profiles. A database of New and Emerging Environmental Techologies (NEET) provides information on new monitoring and control technologies, based on the particular chemical.
Information on odors and odor sampling can be found at the Odournet, St. Croix Sensory and Olfactometry websites.
Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories Emission inventories for greenhouse gas emissions follow specific protocols which describe which emissions should be counted and grouped together, as well as describing how to make the actual calculations of emissions. Once the emissions inventory is completed it can be used for internal planning for reductions, as a record of past actions against future requirements or recorded with one of several registries. The federal registry, run by the Department of Energy, is the most flexible in the data it accepts. That website also includes some useful tools for making calculations. A more tightly defined registry is the California Climate Action Registry, which has published detailed reporting protocols. Another important source of protocols and tools is the joint project of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the World Resources Institue. An extensive discussion of greenhouse gases emissions inventories and protocols is provided by the Pew Center.
Meteorology and Weather A good starting place for weather information on the internet is theWeather Underground site, which provides straight-forward current local weather and forecasts for almost anywhere in the world. Detailed radar and satellite images are available from the Intellicast and Unisys websites. The Unisys site also provides graphical description of current weather model output (under Forecasts).
Another good place to get weather data from around the world is the U.S. National Weather Service home page. From there you can also access current satellite images of weather over North America.
The Canadian Weather Office, in addition to current Canadian weather and forecasts, provides a useful simplified map of the weather systems in north American, including the current location of the jet stream, and a satellite generated map of recent lightning strikes in North America.
A comprehensive collection of current and archived weather data for Washington is available from the University of Washington Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences website. This site also provides access to maps of forecast Pacific Northwest weather patterns for the next 48 hours plotted from the UW's mesoscale model (MM5)output.
The most extensive source of meteorological data for air pollution dispersion modeling is the U.S. National Center for Climatic Data. Lists with details of the type of data available from stations around the world can be viewed or downloaded. The site also offers a search engine which can locate weather stations in the U.S. by working down through the states and picking from a list of cities, from within a degree of a latitude and longitude or even a zip code. This will give you the station name and number, which can then be used to look up the details on the inventory list. Printouts of climatological records are available on-line for a limited number of stations but digital data must be purchased off-line.
A more convenient, quicker and less expensive alternative source of digital data for stations in the western U.S. is the Western Regional Climate Center. Another source of digital data from weather stations all over the western U.S. is MesoWest.
In addition to the EPA SCRAM website described above, meteorological data prepared for modeling is also available from the Lake's Environmental website. Raw radiosonde data for Aermod modeling is available from the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory.

Combustion Calculations Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets used in a recent project to compute the expected exhaust gas flows and estimated pollutant emissions from a coal-fired boiler and an MSW incinerator are available for downloading (about 38k). These spreadsheets calculate sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and chloride emissions by mass balance and nitrogen oxides from emission factors. Calculations are included for the rate of urea injection required for approximately 50% NOx control, the amount of carbon injection required for mercury control, and the humidification water required for effective dry sorbent injection for acid gas control. Users are cautioned to examine the calculations closely as some details will reflect these specific projects. Extensive notes are provided on the spreadsheets.

Odor Sampling Dilution Spreadsheets
If a sampled source has water content much higher than normal ambient humidity it may be necessary to dilute the sample with dry air to reduce the humidity and comply with the sampling protocols. This reduces condensation in the bag during shipment, which might adversely affect the measurement of the odor. A spreadsheet recently developed by us to compute the amount of pre-dilution dry nitrogen is available for downloading (about 20k). The quantity of pre-fill nitrogen is determined by the spreadsheet from pre-sampling measurements of the water content of the source. It is placed in the sampling bags before going out to the sampling site. Both the reported Dilutions-to-Threshold and Persistency must be adjusted when reporting the results. (The olfactometric lab will report their data "as received".)

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