PICEHAir.ORG WEBSITE

PICEHAIR.org provides real-time air pollution monitoring data for the entire southeastern Pennsylvania from Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley in the southeast, to the Lehigh Valley in the north, to Harrisburg, York and Lancaster in the Susquehanna Valley to the west. Our website provides air pollution monitoring data from 16 different PA DEP air monitoring stations as well as from our monitoring station in Kutztown. The website uses maps to show real-time ozone and particle pollution for Berks County (Reading and Kutztown sites), for southeastern Pennsylvania (all 17 sites) and for the U.S. showing the national air pollution forecast from the U.S. EPA AirNow website.

We depict the air pollution conditions using the national Air Quality Index (AQI) color-coded system, where Green means Good air quality, Yellow means Moderate, Orange means Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups (including children), and Red and Purple mean Unhealthy and Very Unhealthy. Our website uses a unique graphic which shows both ozone pollution and fine particle pollution on a single map using a circle and ring graphic. The inner circle color represents the ozone AQI and the outer ring represents the fine particle (also called PM2.5) AQI. The website has a 24-hour looping option that lets you see air pollution episodes and their effects on the different sites as the pollution travels through the region.

Underlying our website and its depiction of realtime pollution data and air pollution alerts is a powerful database. We created a database to capture all the weather and pollution data we collect at our Kutztown site and all the hourly data collected by the DEP at their 16 monitoring sites. A typical site collects realtime data for the pollutants ozone, PM10, PM2.5, NO2, NOx, SO2, and CO as well as the weather parameters temperature, wind speed and wind direction (10 parameters every hour) so you can see our database has to store a lot of data every hour. Our database is used to archive the DEP data and our Kutztown data for use by researchers and students. The historical data is available for comparison on a daily or monthly basis and tools have been provided to allow comparison with graphs or in tabular format.

The “Compare Data” button on the website lets you graph realtime pollution levels at up to six different sites and to compare pollution and weather data for 4 different parameters at a single site. These graphing tools allow you to make sense of all the data we collect and to see trends without having to apply powerful software and statistics. For example, we have seen that fine particle pollution levels are generally higher in the Lancaster and Reading areas than in the Lehigh Valley or in the Philadelphia area during winter pollution episodes. As another example, we have noticed an apparent correlation between elevated nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution concentrations and fine particle levels during winter pollution episodes. These observations can be seen easily with our graphing tools but would otherwise be difficult to discern.