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Why The Air Gets Bad When the Sun Comes Out

Small gasoline-powered engines help create air pollution on sunny days.
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Small gasoline-powered engines help create air pollution on sunny days.

This past week brought the first real taste of spring or maybe even summer weather. Along with the warmth came something less desirable -- air quality alerts. From Connecticut to southern Maine, ozone levels mid-week rose to what the EPA considers unhealthy for those with asthma or other lung problems.

“We had our first warm day, a lot of sunshine, and unfortunately, ground level ozone issues,” said EPA regional administrator Alex Dunn.

Ozone forms when strong sunlight hits exhaust from vehicles and power plants (in the form of volatile organic compounds and oxides of nitrogen).

Not surprisingly, the worst air quality tends to be where the most traffic and other engines are being used, Dunn said.

“We have a lot of people… using small, gasoline-powered engines, their lawn mowers, string trimmers, chainsaws, air compressors and leaf blowers.”

Despite the myriad pollution-creating machines in our neighborhoods, there’s good news, too. Ozone air pollution is actually better today than it was in the 1980s.

For example, in 1983, 120 days were bad days for ozone pollution in Massachusetts using today’s standards. In 2017, there were only 25 bad days for ozone pollution.

“Certainly the long-term trend shows that our work to improve air quality is working,” Dunn said. “But we do have to be ready for changes with the climate.”

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Elsa Partan is a producer and newscaster with CAI. She first came to the station in 2002 as an intern and fell in love with radio. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. From 2006 to 2009, she covered the state of Wyoming for the NPR member station Wyoming Public Media in Laramie. She was a newspaper reporter at The Mashpee Enterprise from 2010 to 2013. She lives in Falmouth with her husband and two daughters.