AUSTIN, Texas - How clean is the air we breathe? Not clean enough, if recent trends hold. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency tightened the s
tandards for acceptable levels of particle pollution . As CBS Austin Chief Meteorologist Chikage Windler found out, Travis County is at risk of nonattainment.
Though we've only had a handful of Air Quality Alerts so far in 2024, we had a combined 38 Ozone Action Days in 2022 and 2023, the most since records have been kept. "Air is drawn in through those lines. It comes in the back of the instrument. There's an internal pump at the end of the air stream that draws the air in. So the actual detection of ozone happens in what's referred to as the ozone bench, which is this long silver piece in the middle," explains Penney.
"Air is drawn in through this sample head at the top. This top piece of the sample head separates out particulate that's PM10 and smaller," he says. That is further filtered down to the smallest fine particles, PM 2.5, which have been shown to have the highest impact on lung health of those who breathe in the pollution. Those fine particles can get deep inside the lungs, making them more hazardous.
Travis County Particle Pollution Ozone EPA Nonattainment PM 2.5 Texas
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