Due to PG&E power cuts in California to prevent wildfires, the national AirNow air quality reporting system, housed in California, is temporarily down. Fortunately, Spokane’s air quality data is available on the state air quality monitoring site here.
Although we operates the local air pollution monitoring stations, the air quality data takes a path that goes through other organizations before coming back to our webpage. The stations are part of a statewide network managed by the Washington State Department of Ecology.
Automated data polling (collecting data from each station) occurs on an hourly basis and data are collected in a computer database located in Olympia.
The Department of Ecology sends a file containing the last hour’s air quality data to a company in Petaluma, California which provides the data to AirNow (EPA) and to the Spokane Clean Air webpage.
The power outage in California has stopped the flow of data. The power outage does not, however, affect reporting of data by the Department of Ecology, which is not reliant on the California company.
