AIRNow.gov: See The Air You’re Breathing Online

If you're anywhere east of the Mississippi (with a few notable exceptions), Friday probably won't be a great day to breathe. Sorry. Someone had to break it to you. Though the air is cleaner than it was decades ago and cars are now loaded with pollution reducing controls, run a gasoline powered internal combustion engine in the presence of sunlight and heat, you're going to get high levels of ozone.

If you're scoring at home--Ozone in the stratosphere, good. Ozone at ground level, bad.

With the federal government's AIRNow.com, there's finally a single point to go for air quality reports and forecasts. With national reporting based on established national standards, air quality can finally be compared. That makes AQI forecasts more useful.

From AIRNow.gov: "It tells you how clean or polluted your outdoor air is, and what associated health effects might be a concern for you. The AQI focuses on health effects you may experience within a few hours or days after breathing polluted air. EPA calculates the AQI for five major air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act: ground-level ozone, particle pollution (also known as particulate matter), carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide."

With the Olympics almost here and all the buzz about China's less than stellar air quality, I went to the page of international links to see how things were going. Dead link! Is it just me, or is that a bad sign? At least the Hong Kong info is still up.

AIRNow.gov asks you to look at the observed and forecast Air Quality Index as a yardstick. I suppose you can, if you're willing to think of the first 3.6" as good and the next 32.4" bad. That's because on the AQI's 0 to 500 scale, only 0 to 50 qualify as good! More than likely this site will just verify what you already know on days when you wish you could just hold your breath and wait for some better air to blow in.