Air Monitoring and Reporting Forum: About

The Ambient Monitoring and Reporting Forum (AMRF) was established to make recommendations to the WRAP with regard to appropriate approaches for collection, use, and reporting of ambient air quality and meteorological monitoring data as needed to further the overall goals of the WRAP.

The AMRF will address the technical recommendations of the Grand Canyon Visibility Transport Commission that relate to ambient monitoring (pages 37 and 63 of Recommendations for Improving Western Vistas). These are rephrased and summarized below:

1. Increase the number of locations that reliably monitor visibility (a) at a greater number of visibility-protected class I areas to track trends; (b) at intermediate locations between major source areas and class I areas to gain a better understanding of source receptor relationships and of long-range transport phenomena.
2. Increase the frequency of aerosol measurements from the current IMPROVE schedule of twice weekly 24-hour duration samples in order to provide more complete temporal coverage.
3. Monitoring should include three components (a) light extinction coefficient monitoring; (b) aerosol speciation and mass concentration of fine and coarse particulate material; (c) meteorological measurements of wind speed and direction, temperature and relative humidity.
4. Tribal lands should be particularly appropriate sites for tracking trends and conduction monitoring case studies.

The AMRF will also serve as a technical resource to aid the WRAP and other forums (e.g. the Tribal Data Development Work Group, Emissions Forum, and the Air Quality Modeling Forum) with issues including:

1. Ambient monitoring methodologies,
2. Data quality and availability,
3. Ambient air quality conditions,
4. Reconciliation of air quality and emissions trends,
5. Empirical evidence for source/receptor relationships and,
6. Methods to estimate background visibility.