Interim results of early PM2.5 monitoring in Texas: Separating the impacts of transport and local contributions
- Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, TX (United States)
- Houston Bureau of Air Quality Control, TX (United States)
- Houston Regional Monitoring Corporation, TX (United States)
- TRC Environmental Corp., Chapel Hill, NC (United States)
- Desert Research Inst. (United States)
The Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC), the City of Houston Bureau of Air Quality Control (BAQC), and the Houston Regional Monitoring Corporation (HRM), an association of industrial firms, began one year`s joint monitoring for PM2.5 in March 1997. At the deadline for submission of this paper, data were available through January 1998. The data from this study give a preliminary indication about the status of a number of areas in Texas under the new PM2.5 National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Because there could be systematic differences between the PM2.5 mass measured by the procedures in this study and the PM2.5 mass that would be measured by the federal reference method and because there is less than one year`s data, the indications about attainment or nonattainment must be interpreted cautiously. In Dallas, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and Houston all measured daily PM2.5 concentrations that have passed Level Two quality assurance procedures are 40 micrograms per cubic meter (m g/m{sup 3}) or less. This includes samples collected on the regular sixth-day schedule and additional samples collected on days forecast to have high PM2.5 concentrations. The mean of samples collected on scheduled days from March 1997 through January 1998 are 10.6 m g/m{sup 3} for Corpus Christi, 10.8 m g/m{sup 3} for San Antonio, 14.3 m g/m{sup 3} for Dallas, and 14.6 m g/m{sup 3} for El Paso. For the seven sites in Houston the scheduled-day means range from 12.4 m g/m{sup 3} to 16.7 m g/m{sup 3}. Transported smoke from agricultural burning in Central America, African dust, and transported continental haze have been found to contribute to PM2.5 levels in Texas. For the Southeast Texas episodes analyzed to this point, the transported PM2.5 contributed more than local sources to the measured ambient concentrations.
- OSTI ID:
- 361954
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-980632--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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