U.S. Air Quality

Special Feature: A new instrument at UMBC

You may not be aware but we have been working on a project called Profiling Air Quality over Baltimore. NASA has funded this effort and new instruments are arriving every day. The Maryland Department of Environment has sponsored a ground based PM_2.5 instrument (the Beta Attenuation Monitor or BAM) and we have installed a 3 wavelength TSI nephelometer. Both have been taking data at UMBC since June.

On Thursday, we installed a new CIMEL sunphotometer which will be part of the AERONET network of aerosol optical depth measurements.

Left image: CIMEL tracking the sun with Baltimore in the background. Right image: looking southeast. The spiky antenna is the lightning mapper which is scheduled to be moved.

UMBC's sunphotometer data can be found on the AERONET site, courtesy of the support of Brent Holben, Ilya Slutsker and David Rines. Today's data: