The Use of Real-Time Air Quality Data in Daily Forecasting and Decision-Making

摘要

Until the last decade, the nation's air quality data were often downloaded from data acquisition systems several days or weeks after they were collected. The data were reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Aerometric Information Retrieval System (AIRS) (now Air Quality System, AQS) within six months of acquisition and were not generally, available for public use for several more months. Because of this time lag, the data were not very relevant to the public, which is much less interested in last season's ozone levels than in what is happening today or tomorrow.