As you walk up the narrow blue steps to the top of a large 40-foot tower, you can see trails of footprints in the snow. If you squint, the green treetops consume your vision and the taste of crisp air refreshes while flowing through your body as the tower begins to sway on a windy day.
This tower's purpose is to be a taste bud for the air; collecting, filtering and retrieving waves of winds and pollutants accumulating information to predict a better tomorrow's air quality. Four miles from the University of New Hampshire campus one of five towers for the ongoing AIRMAP project stands at Thompson Farm.
AIRMAP research focuses on the analysis of existing climate data and the development of new air quality monitoring programs. Researchers are developing a solid background of information that can be used to address New England's changing climate and air quality.
According to Cameron Wake, outreach and health impact researcher and UNH professor, AIRMAP is a Nation Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded project that aims toward a better understanding of why there is bad air quality in the Northeastern region of the country and exactly where it comes from.
The tower itself was hand built by Kevan Carpenter, the project director of AIRMAP. Wavering on a windy day from a westward direction, Carpenter and some students make the climb to the top of the tower daily to change the filters and bring them back to the UNH lab to gather the information and begin further research.
In New Hampshire alone, AIRMAP has five site locations: Mt. Washington, Pack Monadnock, Thompson Farm, Castle Springs and Appledore Island.
There are eight total locations across the New England region. AIRMAP's research and analysis has been a part of the UNH community for seven years but has been undergoing research for 10 years.
An achievement of AIRMAP is being able to "do research year round on Appledore Island," said Carpenter. "It has an ideal location for wind power," with solar and wind panels to generate electricity.
Atop of the current tower at Thompson Farm, the air is received from both southwest and northwest directions, coming to the tower in a "v-type" formation.
At the bottom of the tower sits a set of lasers that on a foggy day or at night can be seen from a number of feet away. The purpose of the lasers is to profile particles in the air in a given amount of feet to show the variation over the land.
With less than 12 of these lasers in the world, UNH is the home for two of them at Thompson Farm for their access for AIRMAP research.
"We use a lot of atmospheric chemistry to trace where the pollution is coming from," Wake said, which can determine why on certain days there is more smog, people with upper respiratory illness, such as asthma, may have a particularly hard time breathing.
Asthmatic people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder have a significant reduction in lung function on a polluted day over a time span of five hours, according to Wake from a detailed study in 2004.
"In the summer, in particular, I have found that I have a harder time breathing," said Sophie Ellis, 19 of Barnstead, N.H. "Although, it is usually toward the end of the summer into the fall season when I can really feel it."
Ellis recalls one time as a child when she complained to her mother by saying her "insides hurt." "It broke my heart seeing her in pain," said Theresa Ellis, Sophie's mother.
It was late August and Sophie was playing with some friends outside. She was diagnosed with asthma that day. Ellis, like other people with respiratory illness, has allergies to pollen.
"We always see this increase in hospital visits occurring sometime in September, which is a factor because of the timing of the outbreak of ragweed and pollen in the fall," said Wake.
However, the winter is also a time that people experience air related problems with breathing.
Factors that change the way people breathe and react to the air quality in the winter could be from the big shifts in temperature, the inside warmth to the outside cold for example.
Although there is less biological debris in the air outside in the winter, people tend to stay inside more, where indoor air pollutants such as dust or animal dander may be driving a shortness of breath in people with upper respiratory problems.
Air quality varies on a year-to-year basis because of the kind of weather in New England. If the weather contains more southern air masses, then that brings in pollution to New England from the eastern seaboard where there are a lot of cities, cars and factories; whereas if there is a lot of northerly air flow, the air would be cleaner, as it is coming from Canada.
The year-to-year variability in air quality is closely linked to atmospheric circulation.
"One of our research goals is to figure out where the actual pollution is coming from, but in general we have tools to figure out the direction of the air," said Wake.
AIRMAP will be going through some significant changes. Within the year, a new site location and a new and larger tower will be constructed on the Thompson farm in a better location where new research can take place.
The new tower will be twice the size of the old one, reaching a height of 80 feet. The equipment area for the tower will be the size of a cottage, whereas today it is the size of a small camper.
The main goals of the new observation center for AIRMAP are to deploy all instruments that are not available in the facility now, to track the air quality in a forest region, as well as to maintain their current research and to develop new collaborations.
"I really hope that with the new observation area, we will be sparking the interest with other programs at UNH with other colleagues," said Carpenter.
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