An email from Donna Martinez alerted me to a press release sent out yesterday by a group called The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, calling on people to show up and protest George Bush’s Earth Day visit to the Smoky Mountain National Park.
In the release the SACE stated that ?last year, ozone levels in the Smokies rivaled those in major cities such as Atlanta and Los Angeles.? I immediately asked one of our trusted interns to call the contact number on the release to ask where the data for this claim came from. After apparently being hung up on the first time he called back and politely noted that he somehow got disconnected. He then asked his question once again and once again was hung up on.
So I decided to do a little fact checking myself. In 2004 for 9 ozone monitors in the North Carolina Mountains there was an average of .22 high ozone days per monitor. This covers everything from Boon to Cherokee, including the city of Asheville. The average number of high ozone days per monitor in the LA SMSA was 15 and for the Atlanta SMSA it was 3. This means that Atlanta area ozone was 13 times greater than the NC mountains and LA area ozone was 68 times the NC mountains.
Yep, ozone in the Smokies rivaled LA and Atlanta last year.
