| Thursday, October 21, 2004 |
14:18 - I've never seen the air so clear
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This morning and yesterday followed the weekend's unseasonable storm, which dumped a huge amount of rain on the Bay Area and then skittered off, leaving the roads to slowly absorb the puddles out from under the piles of startled leaves heaped in the gutters. There are still lingering clouds jetting across the still-chilly sky, as though trying to catch up. It feels like winter. And as is so often the case on days like these, the views across the Valley are spectacular. You can see up to the San Bruno Hills and Mt. Tamalpais from any unobstructed perch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I bike on weekends; and not just that, but the air is so cracklingly clear and crisp, it looks like someone's just wiped the whole region with Windex and turned up the color saturation to eleven.
I haven't lived in the Bay Area long enough to know how unusual days like this are; yet somehow I keep getting the feeling that this kind of thing is getting more frequent, not less.
Apparently it's not my imagination, either:
2004 has had the lowest ozone smog levels since states began measuring the stuff back in the 1970s. Based on preliminary data from around the country, days exceeding EPA's tough new 8-hour ozone standard declined an average of about 50 percent below 2003, which was itself a record year.[1]
A combination of continuing emission reductions and favorable weather explains the improvements. Weather is the single largest factor affecting year-to-year variations in smog levels. All else equal, cool, wet, and windy years will have less ozone than warm, dry, and calm ones. But weather is only part of the story. During the last 30 years most of the country has had several years that were cooler and/or wetter than 2004, but never have smog levels been anywhere near this low.
. . .
Overall, 8-hour ozone exceedance days declined an average of about 50 percent between 2003 and 2004, meaning that 2004 is not only the best year on record, but the best by a large margin.
In The Day After Tomorrow, it took the cataclysmic destruction of the world's civilized regions by freak murderous weather changes for the stain of wretched humanity to be wiped clean from the skies. It is, after all, an article of faith that everything is getting worse with time; nothing ever gets better.
Doesn't news like this just suck?
(Via .clue.)
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Brian Tiemann
