Glacier’s Air Quality Monitor Ed Eberhardy has a reason to celebrate. This week is Air Quality Awareness Week, and we want to share Eberhardy’s efforts to document how air pollution impacts Glacier’s amazing vistas and natural resources. In fact, park staff has been monitoring visibility since 1988 in order to better understand how air pollution affects what we see and the resources we protect.
Although views from Glacier naturally range at about 145 miles, the visual range is reduced to approximately 95 miles. This is because of pollution that blows in from pollutant sources such as power plants, agricultural areas, and oil and gas development. Looking at samples collected by park staff like Ed, scientists can see that most of Glacier’s reduced visibility comes from organic carbon associated with fires, but the second largest contributor is sulfate, which can be associated with industrial processes and fossil fuel combustion.
So why is Eberhardy celebrating? The good news is that since the 1990s, collected visibility data shows that trends on the haziest days are improving! Yet, even though clean cars and clean power are helping to improve our air quality, we have a long way to go from the Clean Air Act goal of no human caused impairment.
[A man doing a handstand is outside a fenced area that contains monitoring equipment and a small, brown building.]