Wisconsin’s air quality continues to improve, UW-Madison professor says

Earlier this year, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency tightened air quality regulations across the United States. 

University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental studies professor Tracey Holloway told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that these regulations are the tightest they’ve ever been. And that means our air is the cleanest it’s ever been. 

“We have instruments across the state measuring the air every hour of every day,” Holloway said. “One of the metrics that the state is focused on right now is if the year’s average measurements are cleaner or dirtier than what is allowed by the Clean Air Act.”

When events like last year’s Canadian wildfires happen, that can throw off the average measurements in an unhelpful way. Scientists can’t tell if the air pollution numbers they’re seeing are because of changes made by people — we can’t tell how well we as a state are actually doing. 

That’s why this month, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is leveraging what’s called an Exceptional Event Demonstration. This would allow them to leave out the data collected during last year’s wildfires from the state’s overall pollution measurement. This helps make sure the data provides a more accurate picture of people’s behavior, and whether we are keeping the air as clean as we can. 

In the interview, Holloway also discussed her air quality work with NASA and specific actions people can take to keep themselves breathing the cleanest air possible.

The following was edited for clarity and brevity.

Rob Ferrett: I’ve seen you quoted saying, “We’ve actually been making progress on our air quality.” What have you seen?

Tracey Holloway: It is a good news story, except for wildfires in Wisconsin and across the United States. Our air has been getting cleaner and cleaner for all of the health-relevant pollutants that are regulated under the Clean Air Act of 1970.

This is due to cleaner cars, cleaner power plants, cleaner industry… I think a lot of people don’t realize how much we’ve done since 1970 to make our air clean and healthy, how much we’re already doing and continue to do so. 

Every year, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources comes out with a report tracking how clean our air is getting. It reports information from monitors all across the state that are measuring our air. It is a good news story for everything within our control, and that’s why it’s important to make sure that we’re not being unfairly penalized for air pollution coming in from Canada due to wildfires.

RF: You lead the Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences team at NASA. Tell us about your work there. 

TH: It’s been really exciting over the last decade or so to see how satellites in space provide information that is useful to people on the ground.

One example is using satellite data to figure out if an air pollution event is due to local sources or if it is due to something else, like wildfires in Canada. Up in space, looking down, you can see these big plumes of smoke moving across wide areas.

But with satellites, we can also see chemicals in the air that are invisible to our human eye. That helps us see whether some neighborhoods may be breathing dirtier air than other neighborhoods, or how individual sources are contributing to air pollution problems. So it’s been really exciting to be at the forefront of this. 

RF: How optimistic or pessimistic are you when you consider our future air quality?

TH: I am really an optimist. One of the reasons is because I think about the successes that we’ve had as humans overcoming big problems.

Our air was getting dirtier and dirtier through the 1960s. Then, in 1970, the Clean Air Act was passed. We turned a corner and our air has been getting healthier ever since then.

In 1985, we discovered the ozone hole over Antarctica. Two years later, in 1987, we passed the Montreal Protocol, and now the ozone hole is in recovery. So climate change is not something that will be solved overnight, but when my kids look back on the 2020s I would love it if they said that is when we turned a corner on climate change and we started moving in the direction of a solution.