How Do Temperature Inversions Affect
Air Quality?
Temperature inversions are relatively common in the Puget Sound area, and refer to reversals of
normal temperature patterns seen in our lower atmosphere. In wintertime, a temperature
inversion occurs when cold air close to the ground is trapped by a layer of warmer air. As the
inversion continues, air becomes stagnant and pollution becomes trapped close to the ground.
Since our area lies in a basin, it takes an extra push of marine air to flush the pollution out of our
area.
Inversions also occur during the summer months, but are a product of even hotter upper air
trapping warm air close to the ground. The result is the same: we are unable to rid ourselves of
the everyday pollution that we create. Air pollution will continue to accumulate until the weather
pattern changes. Just how much air quality degrades depends on our everyday, pollution-causing
actions, such as driving, using gasoline-powered yard and recreational equipment, or burning
wood. Voluntarily refraining from, or limiting, these actions during inversions can help keep air
quality within healthy levels.
Fairbanks area, trying to stay warm, chokes
on wood stove pollution
Wood-burning stoves give the Fairbanks, Alaska, area some
of the worst winter air pollution in the country.
February 16, 2013|By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
A cloud of haze and smoke over Fairbanks, Alaska, feeds growing concerns… (Kim Murphy, Los
Angeles…)
NORTH POLE, Alaska — In Krystal Francesco's neighborhood, known here as the "rectangle of death,"
the air pollution recently was so thick she could hardly see across the street. Wood stoves were cranking
all over town — it was 40 below zero — and she had to take her daughter to the emergency room.
"She's crying because she can't breathe, and I can just see her stomach rapidly going in and out.
Sometimes, she's coughing to the point of throwing up," Francesco said of her 2½-year-old daughter,
Kalli, who uses two different inhalers. "Even in the house, the smoke is coming in and it smells awful."
Most people think of Alaska as one of the last great escapes from urban pollution. But they have not
spent a winter in Fairbanks or the nearby town of North Pole, where air-quality readings in November
were twice as bad as Beijing's.
Here, it's not freeways or factories fouling the air — it's wood stoves and backyard wood furnaces that
send thick clouds of gray smoke roiling into the pines. On the cold, clear days when the temperature hits
minus 50, an inversion layer often traps a blanket of smoke near the ground, and driving to work in
North Pole can be like motoring through fog.
"It's like soup. Like gray soup. I call it the epicenter of hideousness," said Angela Dowler, a veterinarian.
Yet this is Alaska's freedom belt, and nearly every attempt to regulate the offending stoves has been
beaten back at the polls — most recently in October, with an initiative prohibiting the borough from
regulating any heating appliance using any fuel in any way.
"This whole thing has gotten conflated in Fairbanks: 'My wood burner is next to my gun — don't take it
out of my cold, dead hands,'" said Sylvia Schultz, who runs a clean air advocacy website. Schultz moved
to Washington state in July after her husband was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat and her
daughter faced the prospect of attending middle school in a high-smoke zone.
"What's different in Fairbanks is that people are burning not just wood, but coal, and no one's stopping
it. They're promoting it," Schultz said.
Cities across the country struggle with the same kind of soot pollution that is plaguing Fairbanks: tiny
particles measured as PM2.5, so small they can lodge deeply in the lungs and cause respiratory ailments,
heart problems and possibly lung cancer.
Salt Lake City has lately been tagged as having some of the nation's dirtiest air, but here it often is
worse. Since the beginning of the winter stove season, the greater Fairbanks area has logged 48 days
that exceeded health limits established by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The Los
Angeles Basin had only 13 such days in all of 2011.
The smoke in Salt Lake City is attributed mainly to industry and automobiles, while Los Angeles suffers
from ozone pollution and the myriad effects of diesel and car exhaust, along with pollution from ships,
planes and other facts of urban life.
A toxic fog in Salt Lake City in January drew international headlines when it hit three times the pollution
allowed by the federal Clean Air Act, but those levels also are far from unheard of in the Fairbanks
region.
"This is a place where the [levels] are just ridiculous," said Dowler, who suffers from an irregular
heartbeat during the heavy-burning winter months. Her teenage son has had a persistent respiratory
infection since September and was recently diagnosed with pleuritis, an inflammation of the lining of
the lungs.
Francesco has had to start using an inhaler after she exercises. "We have worse pollution than L.A., and
it's just ridiculous that nothing's been done," she said.
One reason the area's air problem seems so intractable is that, in one of the coldest inhabited regions
on earth, there are few affordable alternatives to burning wood and coal.
Though the city lies just 500 miles south of some of the biggest gas fields in the world, there is as yet no
way to move it, and Fairbanks has limited access to natural gas. Since 2008, when fuel oil prices took a
sharp upswing, residents have been paying $4.50 a gallon to fill their furnaces.
"People seriously were in a panic. It really became a question of heat or eat," said Michael Dukes, a
member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly who recently installed a coal stove — only
slightly less polluting than a wood stove — in his home in North Pole's rectangle of death. "I was paying
twice what my mortgage was just to heat my home."
Borough officials are asking residents to install low-emission stoves and burn dry wood. They are
discussing a plan to pay families up to $1,000 a year to burn oil instead of wood on bad air days.
Borough air quality manager James Conner said the October ballot measure rebuffed broader attempts
to outlaw smoky boilers or adopt burn bans, and also prevented any controls on what residents burn in
their outdoor units.