A team of York University researchers are studying Toronto’s air quality this summer as part of a new project aimed at discovering what’s polluting the city’s air.
As the country continues to battle major wildfires and smoke continues to wreak havoc in the city, the university’s atmospheric scientists have taken the initiative to test the city’s air pollution from their rooftop Air Quality Research Station for the next six weeks.
The research project is titled THE CIX, which stands for the Toronto Halogens, Emissions, Contaminants, and Inorganics eXperiment. It is being led by York University’s Faculty of Science experts, Associate Professor Cora Young and logistics lead Assistant Professor Trevor VandenBoer.
The project is designed to examine and analyze the components contributing to the city’s air pollution. In the past few decades, Toronto’s air pollution has shown improvement, however due to the recent smoke in the city, results have reversed and negative effects have risen, the researchers said.
READ MORE: Environment Canada issues air quality warning in Toronto due to wildfires
“One of the things the team hopes to understand, is how a soupy mix of trace chemicals will sometimes combine to create little understood, new and changing threats that can contribute to worse air quality, including emissions from products we use every day, such as paint and pesticides and even perfume, greenhouse gases, as well as perfluorocarboxylic acids (known as “forever chemicals”), and particulate matter – tiny particles of smoke, dust, pollen, emissions and fumes,” according to a news release on Thursday.
Young says this project is crucial towards pin-pointing the gray areas around what specifically is impacting the city’s air.
“This project is important as it allows us to take a robust look at all the pollutants circulating in the air. The Montreal Protocol was successful in helping to fix the ozone layer above us because we knew what to target, but ground-level ozone and other contaminants can still be an issue, particularly spiking on hot summer days, creating poor air quality which can impact people’s health,” she explained.
THE CIX project is part of a larger, international field campaign called Atmospheric Emissions and Reactions Observed from Megacities to Marine Areas (AEROMMA) being conducted across North America by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
York University says state-of-the-art equipment will be utilized during this project to investigate the air pollution sources, including the NASA DC-8 aircraft, a flying science laboratory packed with instruments. This will be used to fly over the school campus this month to take air quality readings from high levels of the atmosphere to be compared with the rooftop readings.
THE CIX team says its main goal is to understand the areas which impact air pollution in the Greater Toronto Area.
