

Who is most vulnerable to health problems when air quality is poor? So just plugging that as a tool for people to find out where places are being impacted and what they can expect tomorrow and the next day works really well.” “This is a site that is run by federal agencies with the most up-to-date information, both from measurements and from forecasts on air quality and what to expect. “I would plug in into your phone or computer and check it like how people get weather forecasts on their phones or from their smart speakers,” he said. Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, says the website should be a regular stop for everyone. is the same thing meteorologists use when they talk about green, yellow, orange, red, purple color coding,” Patel said.ĭr. So it’s not just particulate matter, but it has multiple inputs put out by the EPA that determines what kind of pollution is in the air right now. The Air Quality Index is the US Environmental Protection Agency’s index for reporting air quality. What is Air Quality Index, and what does it tell us?

Shilpa Patel, medical director of Children’s National IMPACT DC Asthma Clinic in Washington. And so an irritant can affect anyone’s lungs and cause you to start coughing and feeling that throat itchiness,” said Dr. “This is like small, very tiny particulate matter that goes deep into the airways. Why does wildfire smoke make it so difficult to breathe? in a dystopian haze, turning the air acrid, the sky yellowish gray and prompting warnings for vulnerable populations to stay inside. Intense Canadian wildfires are blanketing the northeastern U.S. A person talks on his phone as he looks through the haze at the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, N.J., Wednesday, June 7, 2023.
