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Air Quality Monitoring
11/14/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
After the dangerous ozone episodes of this past summer people were looking for answers.
Fortunately research is well under way. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. We
know that ozone up in the sky is a good thing. Chris St. Germain, a specialist with the
Environmental Protection Agency, explains why it's bad here below.
C St. G: What happens with the ground level ozone is that it attacks your respiratory system
and it actually gets way down into your lungs and folks with asthma, or the elderly, or kids,
are definitely more susceptible to it where their systems aren't 100 percent.
Kendall Perkins from New Hampshire's Department of Environmental Services tells us how bad
this year was.
KP: We have an hourly standard of 125 ppb of ozone. That's been exceeded in New Hampshire on
five occurrences this year.
Perkins is responsible for collecting accurate data on Mount Washington and other New
Hampshire sites. What happens to that information?
KP: A lot of the data comes in through the phone line, electronic data loggers, comes into
our office where it gets validated with a series of quality assurance checks. Once the data
is validated we will run a program that uploads that data into the AIRS database.
The data, according to Chris St. Germain, are used to help warn folks when the air is bad.
For example:
C St. G: On the EPA website there's a section called "Air Now" and you can subscribe to
ozone/smog alerts and it will automatically e-mail you.
Tomorrow we will look at the advantage of having a monitoring station in the middle of the
atmosphere. The Weather Notebook is funded by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.
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