Air Quality Index

[queuebit]

I live in the Midwestern part of the United States and we are seeing pollutants from forest fires in Canada often, recently.

Is there a way to pull some standard Air Quality value into the current or forecast data?

Thanks!

[DaveL17]

I live in the midwest as well. I've been pulling air quality data from Open Weather.

[alexander0042]

Great idea, and something I'm looking into! I'm based out of Ottawa, so lots of smoke here too. The trick for this will be finding a source, since I don't want to just pull from another API, as that kind of defeats the point of this project.

My top pick is the HRRR Smoke model. It only covers southern Canada/ US, but it would be a starting point.

[dustinbolton]

@alexander0042 You can get raw air quality data sources for both observation and forecasts for the USA at https://www.airnowapi.org (data files directly at https://files.airnowtech.org/ ) for free. Documentation and free API access comes with the free account.

[alexander0042]

This remains a great idea, and something that I want to look into; however, since it's not part of any of the models that I'm currently ingesting, I think it's out of scope for V2.0. I'm going to put this link here: https://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/aqm/, since I think this is the best option for adding this in in the future.

It is worth noting that smoke is added into the V2.0 spec. So while it's not a technical Air Quality number, it's a big part of it, so something for this summer at least.

[cloneofghosts]

Does the model you posted have global coverage or is it for CONUS only? If that model is for CONUS only you'd probably would still need to look for one with global coverage.

The model I see most sites using is CAMS which I posted the link to above but will also post again: https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/cams-europe-air-quality-forecasts?tab=overview and https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/cams-global-atmospheric-composition-forecasts?tab=overview

Someone else posted a link to Airnow which has grib files for current Ozone, PM10 and PM2.5 based on current observation data. Not sure of the coverage area but I think it would be the US and parts of Canada? https://www.airnowapi.org/ (data files directly at https://files.airnowtech.org/ )

EDIT: I took a look at the current datasets in AirNow and while it would be nice to add the data seems pretty limited. The data seems to be in AQI instead of pollutant concentrations so is not as useful as it would seem