Air Pollution Lab

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources maintains monitoring stations for air pollution; the latest data can be found at <www.dnr.state.mo.us/alpd/esp/aqm/ALLREP.txt>.  You might find other sources for data; the Sefton Council (England) maintains data from several local data collection sources at <http://195.188.50.207/air_quality/air_poll_data.htm>. The site <http://www.eumetnet.eu.org/contpolu.html> maintains links to several current-data locations within Europe (Denmark and France have especially useful sites; Austria’s is useless…).  You may choose to find another source for relatively current data…

Choose a pollutant and two different reporting sites; use methods we have studied to determine 95% confidence intervals for the average level of pollutant at each site and for the average difference of pollutant levels for the time period reported (most use 24 hours).  Alternatively, use data from the same site but different 24-hour periods.  Some pollutants: NO-Nitrogen Oxide, NO2- Nitrogen Dioxide, NOX-Total Nitrogen Oxides, NH3- Ammonia gas, NT- Total Nitrogen compounds, H2S- Hydrogen sulfide, SO2- Sulfur dioxide(1 PPM limit), SO2S- Secondary SO2 (5 PPM limit), O3- Ozone, O3S-Back up Ozone measurement, CO- Carbon monoxide; various data collectors use different symbols or abbreviations, but they all give a key.

Do some research:  find out what the pollutant you chose is, its health effects, the maximum safe levels, why the data is collected and reported, where the pollutant originates (car exhaust, mining industry, etc.), and what the EPA does about the pollutant.  Find out how weather (temperature, precipitation, wind speed, wind direction) affects the pollution levels.  Possible sources for this information include books in the library (check with librarians—they have set aside some references for this activity), or on the web at http://www.epa.gov/ebtpages/airairpollutants.html, http://www.epa.gov/air/topics/comap.html, http://www.pewclimate.org/, or http://www.ghgonline.org/.

What you’ll turn in:

·        The source for your data [geographical location(s) of collection station, date(s), time(s), pollutant, and the url from which you obtained the data].

·        Two 95% confidence intervals (be sure to tell which confidence interval goes with which site/date), PLUS a discussion of the method you used to determine the confidence intervals.  If you used the CLT or a t-distribution, what did you do to confirm that your method was appropriate?

·        A 95% confidence interval for the difference in population means, and a discussion of whether one site (or time) was more polluted than the other, based on this confidence interval.  What assumptions were necessary?  Were they reasonable?

·        A well-written discussion of the pollutant (what it is, health effects, etc.), INCLUDING a citation of any references you used.  I envision a solid paragraph or two.