Air quality conditions fluctuate largely due to changes in weather conditions and emissions of pollutants into the air. Understanding weather conditions helps in the analysis and interpretation of air quality data. Weather measurements, sometimes called observations, are made by government agencies, industry, community groups, and individuals, and are used to measure surface and aloft weather conditions.
Weather balloons, radars, ground-based remote sensors, and satellites are tools to measure aloft weather conditions. Mathematical models use weather measurements to forecast future weather conditions at the surface and aloft. These models simulate winds, temperatures, humidity, and other variables like clouds, precipitation, and stability. Some models make predictions for the entire globe at coarse spatial resolutions, which don’t help to diagnose local air quality conditions.
Other local/regional models have finer spatial resolutions, which are preferred for air quality analyses because they provide more detailed information. Trajectory models are tools that estimate airflow based on measurements and model data and can help identify the source region of pollutants. Trajectories can show the direction in which the air is flowing (forward trajectory), or the source from which the air originated (a backward trajectory).
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