Air quality monitors report terrible air quality, plus we add extra credit on the gloominess scale.
Good afternoon.
You can spend a few minutes looking for academic articles on the virtues of sunshine—mostly you’ll find dermatologists telling you how times have changed—or you can spend a week in California where smoke has all but blocked out the sun to understand why ancient societies worshipped this particular star.
Beyond the fact that I feel the effects of the smoke in my lungs and my eyes (even as I limit my time outdoors), and even though the apocalyptic shades of yellow-orange have passed, it’s the sheer gloominess that’s really getting to me now.
While there is no technical measurement that I know of for gloom, there are measurements for air quality that correspond pretty closely. Specifically, there are monitors that detect particulate matter sized 2.5 microns or smaller. That’s the stuff that's small enough that your nose hairs won't catch or that you won't cough out.
The health risk is that the tiny particles are inhaled, and can go into the lungs and ultimately into the bloodstream, where they cause inflammation—particularly hard on people with heart or lung disease. Not to mention there’s a highly contagious respiratory virus going around.
I was curious about measurements of overall gloominess and smoke, and received several questions from readers, so I called Monterey County Air Pollution Control Officer Richard Stedman for a primer last week. The most apocalyptic days were actually the safest for breathing. "The air quality monitors were good, but it looked like we had just arrived at Mordor or Middle Earth or something," Stedman said. That’s because when the Dolan Fire was growing explosively, it was pushing smoke way up high, where it filtered out the blue light and parts of the spectrum we normally get from the sun, and let red and orange through. The fire has since calmed down, burning somewhat cooler, and the smoke is hugging the ground and mixing with the fog. (That’s extra credit on my gloominess scale.)
The Monterey Bay Air Resources District maintains six stationary air quality monitors, and recently due to the wildfires, placed five more in Big Sur, Monterey, Gonzales, Greenfield and Soledad. (The data from all of those monitors is viewable online.)
There are, by contrast, more than 30 citizen science air quality monitors that feed data to the website Purple Air; MBARD’s data is fed into airnow.gov. Purple Air is meant to give real-time readings, produced by affordable sensors (about $200) that are sold by Purple Air and give more data points. But Stedman cautions that the data might be less reliable, even if it’s more widespread—MBARD’s sensors, by contrast, cost roughly $10,000 apiece, are calibrated weekly and report a 24-hour average. The Purple Air monitors are also placed where people can afford to place them.
Certainly there’s a place for both citizen science type data on a wider, cheaper scale like Purple Air’s and more fine-tuned data like MBARD’s. The takeaway right now from all monitors is, roughly: Air quality is terrible. Stay inside if you can.
One challenge of this fire season and air quality is that in years past, health officials would advise people with breathing challenges to leave the area. Now, during a pandemic, that presents its own health challenges. Sheltering at home is tolerable when you can go outside for exercise or to eat at a restaurant, but now outside if off-limits too. (That’s more extra credit on the gloominess scale.)
Meanwhile, MBARD has gotten multiple complaints of people using leaf blowers to remove ash from their property. That’s blowing settled ash back into the air for all of us to breathe. Please: Don’t be that person. Put away the leaf blower. And stay inside, for now.
-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com
