The three summits of Mount Rainier: Liberty Cap, Columbia Crest,and Point Success (unaltered image)

Most of us would consider a trip to a state or national park to be a chance to get away from the pollution that plagues our cities. But it’s seldom easy to escape the effects of urban, industrial air pollution. Now, with a new art project called ECLIPSE, the web viewer or park visitor can see real time air quality data “imposed” on the otherwise scenic landscapes of our state and national parks.

ECLIPSE, based on an open source program, is the handiwork of artists Cary Peppermint and Leila Christine Nadir of EcoArtTech, and is a sponsored project of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its website turbulence.org.

So, how does it work? Just select a State/National park from a drop down menu, click the “apply AQI (air quality index) conditions” button, and ECLIPSE then performs two “data scraping” functions…if air quality data is available for that park, the program sorts through Flickr.com for images tagged with that particular park’s name, then, the program “corrupts” or alters the image to reflect air quality data (culled from the most recent AQI updates on the www.airnow.gov website) of the nearest, large city within a 65 mile radius.

The air quality rating system uses the following scale: good – fair – moderate – unhealthy – very unhealthy –hazardous*. The AQI rating is a measure of particulate matter in the atmosphere, based on a range of 0 – 500 parts per million, with “good” being 0 - 50 ppm, and “unhealthy” being 151 ppm or higher.

Airnow.gov maintains 300 monitoring stations in cities across the country. With the ECLIPSE program, the more pollution present in the atmosphere of the park’s nearest city, the more visually “corrupted” the image becomes. This alteration process utilizes various algorithms that affect color, saturation, and contrast, and, additionally, impose intermittent mirroring, deletion, or cropping functions on the image’s data file.

Air quality is determined by the presence of particulate matter in the lower atmosphere. Particulate matter is a complex mixture of moisture and small particles of dust, soot, soil, various acids (e.g., nitrogen or sulfur containing acids) and trace metals.

The artists’ website notes that, In 2008, the EPA’s own Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council (CASAC) protested that the EPA was not upholding its mission to protect air quality standards according to
the scale.

*Note that U.S. air quality ratings are different than Canada’s AQ rating system, for example. The U.S. system has more gradations of air quality in which “moderate” in the U.S. system is rated as “unhealthy”  on the Canadian scale. The site offers a visual comparison of air quality ratings between the US and Canadian indexes.

With all the fuss over the Senate seat and the Tribune Company’s editorial board and the five-year investigation that’s been going on and Rod’s wife’s potty mouth…I decided to check in on Blago’s environmental record.

Read more of this story »