Air Pollution Dog Blog — air pollution

What is Particulate Matter?

Airborne particulate matter (PM) is not a single pollutant, but rather is a mixture of many chemical species. It is a complex mixture of solids and aerosols composed of small droplets of liquid, dry solid fragments, and solid cores with liquid coatings. Particles vary widely in size, shape and chemical composition, and may contain inorganic ions, metallic compounds, elemental carbon, organic compounds, and compounds from the earth’s crust. Particles are defined by their diameter for air quality regulatory purposes. Those with a diameter of 10 microns or less (PM10) are inhalable into the lungs and can induce adverse health effects. Fine particulate matter is defined as particles that are 2.5 microns or less in diameter (PM2.5). Therefore, PM2.5 comprises a portion of PM10.

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No one wants to hear news about a coronavirus. We are tired of it. But, the more we know the better we can try to live. This news comes from Malaysia where scientists have connected a coronavirus in dogs that might be transmitted to humans.

In the past 20 years, new coronaviruses have emerged from animals with remarkable regularity. In 2002, SARS-CoV jumped from civets into people. Ten years later, MERS emerged from camels. Then in 2019, SARS-CoV-2 began to spread around the world.

For many scientists, this pattern points to a disturbing trend: Coronavirus outbreaks aren't rare events and will likely occur every decade or so.

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2020 was a bad year for many reason but most saw air quality improve in much of the world, except California. Pandemic lockdowns helped improve air quality worldwide in 2020, the U.S. saw its air quality worsen — particularly on the West Coast — thanks largely to record-setting wildfires and toxic smoke.

Southern California dominated the list of most polluted U.S. cities in 2019, the fires of 2020 moved that distinction to Central and Northern California, according to the annual report released Tuesday, March 16, by IQAir, a Swiss company that has partnered with the United Nations to create the world’s largest air-quality data platform.

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A new study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) is predicting a grim future for wildfires and the resulting toxic smoke. 

Over the past four decades, burned area from wildfires has roughly quadrupled in the United States. This rapid growth has been driven by a number of factors, including the accumulation of fuels due to a legacy of fire suppression over the last century and a more recent increase in fuel aridity shown for the western United States), a trend which is expected to continue as the climate warms.

These increases have happened parallel to a substantial rise in the number of houses in the wildland–urban interface (WUI). Using data on the universe of home locations across the United States and updated national land cover maps, we update earlier studies and estimate that there are now ∼49 million residential homes in the WUI, a number that has been increasing by roughly 350,000 houses per year over the last two decades. Read More...

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