In more than a half century since the Clean Air Act was enacted, there have been dramatic improvements in air quality in the United States, as regulations demanding less-polluting cars and factories helped lift cities from clouds of dirty smog.
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Wildfire smoke is eroding decades of air quality improvements-- study
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Wed, 2023-09-20 12:14 — mike kraft
Over the past two decades, air quality improvements have slowed or reversed in most of the country, eroding about a quarter of the recent gains, according to a new study in the journal Nature. Some states — Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Washington and Wyoming — have rolled back 50 percent or more of their progress since 2000. In Oregon and Nevada, wildfire smoke has completely erased their gains.
“We had had so much success, and wildfires, just in five to six years, are really unraveling a lot of this progress,” said Marshall Burke, the paper’s lead author and a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University. “And that’s unfortunate.”
The study builds on previous work by Burke and his colleagues, who had created a detailed map of how much wildfire smoke there has been in the country over the past two decades. That effort relied on melding data from air quality sensors, satellite images of smoke plumes, and computer models that could estimate smoke levels in remote areas without sensors.
The new paper seeks to answer the question: What has all this wildfire smoke done to overall air pollution levels?
What they found was sobering.
Data from air quality sensors around the country had been showing steady improvement since 2000 in most states. But around 2016 — and earlier in some Western states — the trend broke. Since then, air quality progress has significantly slowed in 30 states. In 11 others, it began to reverse.
One of the main reasons is wildfire smoke.
The statistical analysis by Burke and his colleagues through 2022 found that wildfire smoke significantly influenced air quality trends in 35 of the contiguous states. States that are still improving would have done so faster without smoke, they found. In some Western states, air quality that otherwise would have kept improving is now getting worse because of that smoke.
“To me it was really a surprising number of states that were being affected,” said Marissa Childs, a co-author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. “We’re really starting to see that impact over the entire country.”
Wildfire smoke is not directly regulated by the Clean Air Act and is often harder to manage than other types of air pollution. Fires are irregular in duration and intensity. Smoke can travel huge distances, affecting places far from the source. The Biden administration is pushing to expand prescribed burns and tree-thinning projects — to keep fires smaller and less destructive — while encouraging protections against exposure to smoke.
“This isn’t a traditional source of air pollution where you can put a scrubber on a smoke stack or something like that,” said Jason Sacks, a research epidemiologist with the Environmental Protection Agency. “It’s going to be more of community and personal preparedness and trying to figure out what can I do to protect myself and reduce my exposures.”
This year has been particularly bad for smoke. Hundreds of wildfires burning across Canada poured smoke across the border into the Northeast and other parts of the country less accustomed to orange skies and choking air. There were days in June when New York City had some of the worst air quality of any major city in the world.
Childs said if their study had been redone with 2023 data, “the results we’d find would only be stronger.”
The consequences of more smoky days and deteriorating air quality could have profound impacts on Americans’ health. Across the country, researchers are trying to unravel what those effects may be.
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