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A Melbourne and Geelong Air Pollution Case Study- The King Island Bushfires -What happened?During the three day period 11 to 13 January 2001, Melbourne suffered reduced air quality because of bushfire smoke. Most of the smoke came from a large bushfire on King Island, with some contribution from a bushfire near Winchelsea (a small town not far from Geelong). The deterioration in air quality began late on Thursday 11 January. On Friday 12 January the air quality was bad enough for EPA to issue a press release warning people with respiratory illnesses to take due care. The smoke cleared during the morning of Saturday 13 January. View EPA Victoria's media release on the King Island bush fires Have a look at the primary dataYou can get access to the actual readings that were made at Melbourne's air monitoring stations during this period. There are many pollutants in bushfire smoke, however, the most significant one is "particles". Note that some of Melbourne and Geelong's Air Monitoring Stations (AMSs) weren't measuring particles at this time, so select from an AMS of the list below*. The King Island fires' pollution episode was mostly restricted to Melbourne. The AMS at Geelong South recorded a brief period of particle pollution above the particles standard on 13 January. From the main menu of AQ4kidz, select the heading "Air Monitoring information". This will take you to a map of the Port Philip airshed, which shows where EPA's Air Monitoring Stations (AMSs) are located. Clicking on an AMS icon will give you access to data from that AMS. You can get an overview of the period concerned by selecting the pollutant "particles", then selecting either for the month of January 2001, or selecting for a weekly summary, which covers the three days. The week beginning 10 January will do this for you. For a more detailed view of this pollution event, you should then view some daily summaries. These provide a more detailed view of the event with up to 24 hourly readings of the pollution levels. Again nominate particles as the pollutant, and view in turn daily summaries for 11 January, 12 January and 13 January. Don't forget to nominate the year - 2001. If you like, you can print out any of these summaries of data. In each case, whether monthly, weekly or daily summaries are involved, you will get printouts of tables of data plus graphs of the data. Note: Data can be exported from the program as excel files. Not your usual summer smog episodeIn most cases where summer air pollution is a problem, it is due to an episode of summer smog due to raised levels of the photochemical pollutant ozone. In this case, however, we have a summer air pollution episode due to raised levels of particles. Strictly speaking, we should avoid use of the term 'summer smog' to describe this situation. Which AMS* measures particles?The concentration of particles in the air can be measured in different ways. The monitoring stations in the table below all measure particles as API (Air Particle Index), which is the only measure of particles displayed on this web site.
The other AMS either do not measure particles, or were not measuring particles during January 2001 due to equipment problems. If you have selected Footscray (for example) as your air Monitoring station, you will get the message: "No results found for this search!" The contents of this page were last edited, Monday, 17 July 2006 |
EPA Victoria, 40 City Road, Southbank Vic 3006 |
