INDIANAPOLIS — It's a hot, humid week in Indiana, but there haven't been many problems this week with air quality.
WRTV visited one of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management's air monitoring sites to find out more about how they measure air quality and why we have not seen much of an impact this week.
The site sits inside two trailers at Washington Park in Indianapolis. They are located right behind the police station. If you didn't know what they were, you probably wouldn't take much notice of them.
Look a little closer and you'll see all sorts of instruments on top of the roofs of both trailers.
Take a step inside, and you'll be transported into a science lab.
Racks of air monitors filled the small room. Each measures a different type of gas or pollutant.
"We're just focused on the air as it is outside," explained Michael Burks, an air monitoring environmental manager for IDEM. "What's in the air that we're normally breathing."
Burks knows exactly how all the monitors work. That being said, the operation is entirely automated, and it doesn't require any people to run and take continuous air measurements.
"These various air monitors are sampling 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Burks continued.
Back to the roof, this is where you'll see a device where air flows into a tube. The tube transports the air back down inside the trailer. A multitude of lines take air into separate gas analyzers.
Burks shared that some things being measured include ground ozone, sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen.
Ozone is harmful for humans to breathe when it forms at ground level. This typically happens in summer, when heat, sunshine and human-made products (like gasoline or exhaust from cars and trucks) combine.
The oxides of nitrogen are measured at this site because they are needed to form ozone. When nitrogen oxide levels increase, it could be a precursor to ozone formation.
Because data is collected around the clock, it means a constant flow of numbers for IDEM meteorologists to analyze.
John Welch is one of these meteorologists. He says he uses a combination of air measurements from this site and weather information from the National Weather Service to make his forecasts.
"We use this data to help make forecasting decisions," Welch explained. "We issue daily forecasts during the summertime for ozone."
Throughout the year, his team also monitors for other harmful things in the air.
So far, Welch says ozone hasn't been a huge problem this week.
"Typically, during a heat wave, you will see elevated ozone. You need a certain set of weather conditions as well. You can have 85, 90-degree days with high humidity, like we have today, and see no ozone whatsoever," Welch described.
Even though most Hoosiers are not fans of all the humidity this hot week, it may secretly be helping us.
"If the humidity was a little bit lower, we had less cloud cover, we might see a spike in ozone," Welch continued.
This air monitoring site is just one of more than 50 sites in Indiana.
When air in a particular location has an unsafe level of ozone (or any other harmful substances), IDEM will issue an Air Quality Action Day. You can view current forecasts here.
Air Quality Action Days are issued anytime portions of the state bump out of the green or yellow (good or moderate) categories.
While you may not think about the air you're breathing very often, you can breathe a little easier knowing this team is constantly monitoring the air.
