After 28 days in Salt Lake City plus two weeks of integration, we’ve made it to the end of the UWFPS Campaign!   We are happy to report that the weather cooperated enough for us to complete all of our flight hours, EXACTLY! The last flights were mainly at night and in non-inversion conditions. Even… Read More

And now, a collection of pictures that didn’t make it into the rest of the blog:        … Read More

While emissions that affect air quality are released mostly during the day, there is still chemistry at night that determines how long certain pollutants stick around. This is particularly true for  the chemistry of nitrogen oxides.  NOX (NO and NO2) is emitted from a variety of sources, both natural and human caused. In the winter,… Read More

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about measuring Salt Lake City’s PM2.5 pollution, but you may be wondering: What exactly is PM2.5, and what do we mean when we say we are “measuring” the pollution? Let’s start with the observable problem and work backwards to the science: The city is most concerned with its… Read More

When we arrived in Salt Lake City three weeks ago, the region was in the middle of an inversion event. This was great for the start of our research project because we were able to immediately start using our 80 allotted flight hours. To keep track of our hours and how the project is progressing,… Read More

People in Salt Lake City are very aware of air quality issues that occur during inversion events. As a result, there is great local interest in the work that we’re doing here. To keep people informed, we held a media day on Wednesday, February 1. Interest was particularly high because we were in the midst… Read More

With so many instruments and some overlapping measurements in the airplane, it’s important that we know exactly what and how much  we’re measuring to make sure we provide the most accurate results and that all the instruments agree with each other. In order to accomplish this,we have come to Salt Lake City well equipped with… Read More

The decision about whether or not to fly happens the night before, based largely on weather forecasts for the next day. We are trying to get a good mix of inversion and non-inversion conditions, and both daytime and nighttime flights, but the weather can be challenging, with fog over the lake during inversion conditions and… Read More

As luck would have it, we arrived during an inversion event.   Cold-pool (e.g. inversion) conditions began in the Utah, Salt Lake, and Cache Valley’s on Saturday (1/14). Without the guarantee of another inversion event occurring before we leave, we wanted to start flying right away. Fortunately, both the Twin Otter and the rental truck… Read More

For those readers who might be interested, this post provides a few more technical details about our flight plans….   For this study, we planned three different flight patterns that cover the Utah, Salt Lake, and Cache Valleys (described further below).  Besides collecting data that is distributed across the region, these flights also include elements that… Read More