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Please try again later.Realtime California Air Quality
61–64 of 64 posts
Re: Realtime California Air Quality
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
at least, those 1500 square miles can't burn again... maybe CA need to do controlled burns like FL does (if they don't already do it). IE: Burn dry brush in the forests.
I believe California does, but the scale of the problem is completely different compared to a sate like Florida. California has 2.5x as much land as Florida and a significantly higher percentage of the total land is wilderness or otherwise undeveloped.
Not just wilderness or undeveloped, but highly inaccessible to firefighting crews. The Bay Area has peaks over 4000 feet with lots of fairly sheer areas. Often firefighters have to be dropped in by helicopter.
Florida is mostly low rolling hills with the highest point in the state being ~350 feet above sea level. If Florida has a fire in an inaccessible area, it's usually inaccessible due to water, so more of a help to firefighters than a hindrance.
Re: Realtime California Air Quality
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't know about airnow.gov - thanks! I'm surprised though why the data is so different between airnow and purpleair. On AirNow, SF currently shows unhealthy air (150~) whereas purpleair shows 88 (moderate). Which one of these is more reliable and real-time?
Someone posted a Medium article [0] on the /r/bayarea subreddit where they did some digging into this. Apparently the sensors used by Purple Air rely on a constant that represents the average density of the particles it detects. Because wood smoke particles are less dense than typical PM 2.5 particles, the resulting AQI values are too high. The Lane Regional Air Protection Agency has developed a conversion formula th…
^^^ this
That article is well worth a read. I now am using PA in this mode.
Re: Realtime California Air Quality
#64I've found http://www.airnow.gov very helpful and faster to load than the Purple Air map. They also have a simple but efficient app. Airnow's map is slow to load, but shows smoke, air monitors (including the Purple Air ones^[footnote]), and fires all at once: https://fire.airnow.gov/?lat=37.40&lng=-122.077&zoom=10# A less detailed, fast, static map for the SF Bay Area is available at http://www.baaqmd.gov . Last, but…
The shortcoming of the AirNow data is the sparse sampling. If you search for your city you can see the caveat underneath with something like "AnyTown Reporting Area". When you look at the sensor coverage it's much more sparse than the corresponding PurpleAir sensor coverage.
There's also the fire map that includes both public and private sensors, the regular interactive map I don't believe uses all the available sensors. https://fire.airnow.gov/ > Notice: The Sensor Data Pilot adds a new layer of air quality data from low-cost sensors.