January 21, 2011
Moderate to Unhealthy Air Quality (Code Orange) in California
(January 24th - Update): Thanks to Mr. Daniel Alrick from Sonoma Technology we found out that the unhealthy levels we observed in the AQI animation of California/Nevada region was actually due to erroneous data of both ozone (north of LA) and PM2.5 (close to Monterey). The correct animation of the day can be viewed here.
Today California experienced very unhealthy levels of PM2.5 close to Santa Cruz and Watsonville, south from San Francisco. The first image to the left shows California's combined AQI animation from AIRNow and to the right is the current condition which shows air quality improvement with good to moderate AQI.
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Higher levels of PM2.5 was predicted in this region by this CMAQ PM2.5 product ran by Sonoma Technology, Inc. that uses MM5 weather forecast model to drive the model on a 36-kilometer grid (learn more about this experimental product at BlueSky Gateway Beta).
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From AIRNow-tech some stations around that area shows increasing levels of PM2.5 throughout the day. There are no forecasts of code orange in California tomorrow, according to AIRNow.
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In that same AIRNow animation, North from Los Angeles, we can see another isolated region of very high AQI which, surprisingly was due to ozone instead of PM2.5.
Just wanted to say thanks for providing such rich and detailed information. Is there a chance to receive the "Hourly" data as a .csv or even auto-updating text file ? Im looking for this real data for an advertising project with my website (Edited... sorry we don't allow backlinks to unknown sides ... the editors) . Thx ! Jenny
Posted by: Jenny DeCal at January 22, 2011 9:30 AMJenny, thanks for the question. Data may be obtained from AIRNOWTech (see the link on the right). Sonoma Technologies will need to know the use of the data and it may not be provided for a commercial use. Contact them.
Posted by: Ray Hoff at January 23, 2011 10:10 AM