what determines air quality? and how do you improve it?
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Air quality is determined by several factors. If we’re talking about ambient air quality (ie outdoors) the criteria pollutants are ozone, sulphur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and particulate matter 2.5 microns or smaller. These all contribute to smog and have impacts on human health. There is also impacts from volatile organic compounds, like benzene. Improvements are made by eliminating the sources of these compounds. For SO2 and NOx that’s reducing emissions from vehicles and industrial processes. Petroleum refineries for an industrial example will use a flare during process upsets to avoid larger issue at the facility. However this means they release a lot of SO2 and VOCs. Scrubbers and other pollution reducing measures can be used to limit how much SO2 gets release, as does removing the sulphur compounds in the feed stock. PM2.5 and Ozone are generally the result of atmospheric reactions between those other compounds and aren’t primary pollutants (ie released from a point source) so reducing those other compounds helps reduce them too.
>what determines air quality?
Amount of pollutants in the air.
>and how do you improve it?
Remove pollutants from the air, or prevent them from being released into the air to begin with.
In general it is something called particulate matter often shortened to pm in atmospheric data, basically microscopic particles which can be inhaled deep into the lungs and cause damage https://youtu.be/PmKz3wCoycQ In addition there are gases such as ozone which while positive high up in the atmosphere are potentially lethal to animal life including humans at ground level, ozone can be created by the action of sunlight on dust particles converting oxygen into ozone. https://youtu.be/CYVzcZbhxxs other dangerous gases are carbon dioxide and especially carbon monoxide. Too much of any of these items creates poor air quality, reducing fumes from fires, factories and cars improves air quality. A strong wind can move local air pollution to another area and bring in cleaner air from over the oceans etc
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