Check out current ozone and weather in over 30 national park areas plus recent data in a timeline format.
Airborne Contaminants Found in Western U.S. and Alaskan National Parks
Burial Lake, Noatak Nat'l Preserve, AK
Photo: A. Schwindt
Numerous airborne contaminants, including heavy metals and both current-use and historic-use pesticides, have been detected in 20 western U.S. and Alaska national parks from the Arctic to the Mexican border. While concentrations of most of these contaminants were below levels of concern, others appear to be accumulating in sensitive resources such as fish. These and other results were recently finalized from the Western Airborne Contaminants Assessment Project (WACAP), a six-year, multi-agency study funded primarily by the National Park Service to evaluate the potential threats to park ecosystems and likely sources of these contaminants. more »
The National Park Service, in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, has announced the availability of, and is accepting comments on, the draft FLAG Phase I Report--Revised.
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The NPS expanded its annual reporting of air quality trends in national parks, from 52 to 141 parks. In the latest analysis of atmospheric deposition, ozone, and
visibility air quality data, for the period 1996-2005, 86% of the parks have stable or improving air quality. For more information, view the 2006 GPRA Report. (PDF 1.7 mb).
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» State Regulatory Plans for Protecting Visibility in Parks - States are required to submit regulations to improve visibility conditions for NPS Class I air quality areas to EPA.
If the current amount of total nitrogen deposition measured at the high-elevation monitoring site in Rocky Mountain National Park (4 kg/ha/yr) was the same throughout the park, the amount of airborne nitrogen entering the park would be equivalent to 943,000 twenty-pound bags of fertilizer. more » archive »
