The Saskatchewan Air Monitoring Lab is a mobile monitoring station that can be moved around the province, and this month it can be spotted in Yorkton, behind the Water Treatment Plant.
Dr. Kevin McCullum, Chief Engineer with Saskatchewan Environment, says that the lab has been used in studies around the province, and is now studying the Great Plains Air Zone to look at whether a permanent air monitoring station would make sense in the area.
“We thought if the weather holds out as it has been, we’ll have it parked out for a month or so, collect some valid data and see what’s going on in the community.”
The other reason is that the SAML can help them decide what air quality measurements are relevant to the area if permanent monitoring is recommended.
“The SAML itself is able to monitor quite a few parameters, we can do everything from ozone, nitrogen species, sulpur species, the hydrogen sulphide, particulate matter, and all of our meteorological data... Putting it out there gives us the ability to monitor a broad swath, and if there’s a particular part of interest we can look at the air zone bringing in a new monitor that, say, focuses in on sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, or ozone and particulate matter, things like that.”
There are currently five monitoring stations run by the government, but a total of 18 stations through the air zones in the province.
They’re all tied together in order to get a picture of what is going on in the province, McCullum explains.
This summer provided a demonstration of the value of having an extensive air monitoring network in place, because the many station gave a picture of what the particulate matter in the air was doing.
McCullum says that the monitoring is how we get a good idea of what is happening in the atmosphere.
“It was interesting this year with the wildfires, because we were able to look at all of the plumes with the sites throughout the province. It was nice to see if it was coming from the north down south, was it coming from the west from the fires out in BC, it was good to identify some of that with all the extra monitoring that is in place.”
Typically the data is arranged in month-long chunks, and McCullum says that they will decide more once they have a chance to examine the data collected in the city.
