While the fact that areas of the Uintah Basin are in nonattainment for ozone pollution is not great news, the efforts of local scientists made a major difference in the designation assigned by the EPA. On May 1st, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that portions of Duchesne and Uintah County were assigned a Marginal designation of ozone nonattainment. Director of the USU Bingham Research Center Dr. Seth Lyman explains that were it not for the Bingham Research Center team, the classification would have been for Moderate nonattainment, rather than Marginal. “Huy Tran, one of the scientists in our team, discovered and did a great deal of work to prove that some high ozone days in the summer of 2015 were caused by intrusion of ozone-rich air from the stratosphere, and that those days qualified as ‘Exceptional Events’, meaning that they could be stricken from the air quality record,” explains Dr. Lyman. “After that discovery, we worked with the EPA and others to get that official Exceptional Event declaration completed…Huy’s work literally made the difference between Marginal and Moderate nonattainment.” Congratulations and thank you to Huy Tran and the research team.
