JLF Adjunct Scholar Joel Schwartz has a great piece on the ALA State of the Air 2005 report over at Techcentralstation.com. To summarize Joel notes:
Ongoing declines in ozone-forming pollution are the main reason for the long-term downward trend. Four of the last five years were the four lowest ozone years since national monitoring began in the mid 1970s, suggesting that something more than random weather variations explains recent air quality improvements.
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Levels of fine particulates (PM2.5) are also at record lows. Annual-average PM2.5 levels declined more than 14 percent between 1999 and 2004, and 45 percent between 1981 and 2004. Thirty-three percent of U.S. monitoring locations violated federal PM2.5 standards in 2001, but only 15 percent as of the end of 2004. Once again, both are huge improvements over the 80 percent violation rate during the early 1980s.
