National Urban Air Toxics Monitoring Program 1987 through 2001

摘要

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sponsors the National Urban Air Toxics Monitoring Program (UATMP) to help State and local environmental agencies assess the composition and magnitude of urban air pollution for potentially toxic species. Eastern Research Group has managed the UATMP for EPA since its inception in 1987. Air monitoring devices used in the UATMP have collected over 40,000 ambient air samples, which were subsequently analyzed for concentrations of over 300 different organic species and 12 inorganic species at monitoring sites across the United States. Accordingly, an extensive data set has resulted from 15 years of UATMP monitoring efforts that can provide invaluable insight into the many factors that affect urban air pollution. Detailed statistical analyses of the ambient air monitoring data collected over these years (i.e., presenting number of monitoring sites, number of samples, percent completeness, and frequency of occurrence of individual species) are provided to characterize the overall data set. These monitoring data are publicly available in electronic format from the Air Quality Subsystem (AQS) of the EPA's Atmospheric Information Retrieval System (AIRS) after each monitoring year's data are validated and reported. This vast data set offers numerous opportunities to perform a wide variety of statistical analyses or treatments to evaluate factors that may impact air quality (within an urban center, or from one urban center to others), to establish trends, to determine whether levels of air pollution present public health concerns, to identify which emissions sources contribute most strongly to air pollution, and to forecast whether proposed pollution control initiatives might significantly improve air quality. Three specific examples of data treatment are presented.