Air Pollution Monitoring and Emission Inventories

This information is essential for many different purposes including:

• Understanding the current state of air pollution in Canada
• Understanding the changing chemistry of the atmosphere
• Enabling effective policy making, research and program development.
• Enhancing citizen and community awareness, understanding, and ability to participate in that which affects their health, environment and economic well-being.
• Identify new areas of concern
• Modelling air quality processes and pollutants, such as ozone and particulate matter, to better anticipate, or forecast, future air quality conditions, as well as better understand the potential impacts of proposed regulations, technologies, and changes in the environment.

Although monitoring and inventories both contribute to the wealth of air pollution information gathered, they address different aspects of the air pollution story in Canada.

Monitoring

Monitoring stations continuously measure the concentrations of specific pollutants in the outside air. Pollutants, in this case, come from many different sources, locally and globally, which collectively contribute to poor air quality.

Not all monitoring stations have the technology to measure the same set of pollutants. As a result, similarly designed monitoring stations are strategically located within urban and rural locations as part of monitoring networks.

Inventories

Inventories refer to the collection of information on a specific set of pollutants released into the environment directly from sources such as industrial facilities. As a result, information from inventories comes from a single, clearly identifiable source.

This information is collected when facilities report pollutant release data once each year as required by the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 (CEPA 1999).