Air pollution monitoring site selection

Article By:

Kimbrough, Sue National Exposure Research Laboratory, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Vallero, Daniel A. National Exposure Research Laboratory, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Last reviewed:October 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.017710

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• Air pollution monitoring site selection, published December 2009:Download PDF Get Adobe Acrobat Reader

The process for selecting an air-pollution monitoring site. Historically, the Clean Air Act was concerned only with criteria air pollutants, the six common air pollutants for which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had set standards. In 1990, the Clean Air Act was amended to address 188 chemical classes of air toxics. Mobile source air toxics (MSATs) are emitted by vehicles either directly from exhaust systems or indirectly, such as from re-entrainment of particle matter from roads (Fig. 1). Addressing MSATs requires the combined expertise of engineering (for example, civil and mechanical engineering as applied to highway design and vehicle performance, respectively), the physical sciences (for example, particulate and gas phase partitioning of chemical compounds), and the social sciences (for example, decision theory as applied to selecting sites for representative samples from which to infer possible exposures).

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