Tagged: air pollution

The Louisville Metro area is coming off of a string of bad air quality days, in which ozone levels were high enough to be unhealthy for many people. But relief may be on the horizon.

There were four consecutive air quality alerts called last week, but ozone levels were only high enough to exceed the federal standard on three of those days: Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Air Pollution Control District spokesman Tom Nord says the weather could be tricky to predict this week, but it seems likely Louisville’s ozone levels will remain normal for now.

Wondering how much carbon dioxide is being emitted in your country, state, county or Congressional district? I  just came across a cool database produced by CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) that has all of that information.

The need for more sophisticated pollution controls at power plants as led to an increased demand for limestone. And a quarry in Meade County has installed new equipment to meet that demand.

Power plants have to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, and one popular way of doing that is running it through layers of crushed limestone mixed with water. The sulfur dioxide bubbles through the high-calcium limestone, and doesn’t go out the smokestack.

The Air Pollution Control District is forecasting high levels of ozone on Saturday. This marks the fourth consecutive day of Air Quality Alerts: there's already an alert in place today, and alerts were issued on Wednesday and Thursday. The air turned out to be normal on Wednesday, but ozone levels were slightly elevated yesterday.

So far this year, there have been 26 air quality alerts, but not all of those days have actually resulted in bad air.