Air quality

Seattle is having bad air quality due to wildfires in Eastern Washington - bad enough that we stay inside with all the windows closed. Fortunately, it's not super hot here, so although we miss tennis, we are fine. 

My department chair is an atmospheric chemist, and anytime there is wildfire smoke, he goes into super data collection mode. He wanted to measure conditions at a variety of locations and asked if our family would help out. It was super cool! He gave us a handheld particle counter.

Each run is one minute: it sucks in air through the silver tube on top, measures the size of particles in the air with laser scattering, and delivers a count of different-size particles, ranging from over 10 microns to less than 0.3 microns. We learned that 10-micron particles are stopped in the nose, 2.5-micron particles are stopped in the throat, and 0.3-micron particles go all the way into the alveoli in the lungs, making them the most impactful to people's health. We were asked to do a series of five one-minute runs indoors, and another series of five one-minute runs outdoors, to help answer the question of how much difference it actually makes to stay inside. Here's Aaron doing the outdoor run.

This is our data sheet. Fascinating! Obviously indoors is way better.

When we delivered this data to the scientists, they were impressed at how clean our indoor air is and asked if we had been running a filter. We have! It's fun to know it makes a difference.