SALT LAKE CITY — It may just look like a haze, but poor air quality is inevitable, especially during the winter.
“I think of air quality almost as the silent killer,” said Professor Derek Mallia with the University of Utah’s Department of Atmospheric Science. "If you're exposed to enough poor air quality over your lifespan, it can definitely impact the quality of your life.”
That haze can be caused by weather-based inversions.
“The warmer air on top of the colder air close to the ground traps all those pollutants in our valley, and it gets kind of dire,” explained Lexi Tuddenham with HEAL Utah.
WATCH: Inversion mucks up Salt Lake City's worst air quality to worst in US
Mallia felt like air quality was often overlooked and wanted to make a change.
“When you go outside, you want to know: Is the air quality going to be good? Is it going to be bad?" he said. "If it's during the summertime, is it going to be smoky when I go to that National Park? So, these are kind of the gaps that we want to fill."
The iPhone weather app offers information on air quality that day, but the new app “Flow AQ” shows Utahns what the air quality looks like over the next four days, which could be helpful this week alone.
“Tuesday definitely looks like the air is going to get really unhealthy on that particular day, and then maybe by Wednesday, things will clean out just a little bit. But I would still argue that the air quality will not be great,” Mallia said.
Mallia, who is also the co-founder at Trace AQ, which launched the app, walked FOX 13 News through how data is collected.
“We actually run an air quality forecast on a supercomputer, and it does a bunch of calculations that can basically kind of figure out based on physics of the atmosphere, a little bit of machine learning and AI,” he said, "will we have poor air quality or not."
The app collects data for every location in the Western U.S. and uses a color-based system to show how dangerous the air is.
“If it's moderate, those that are sensitive to poor air quality, so those with asthma, cardiovascular or respiratory issues, those are the people that may not want to be outdoors very long,” Mallia said. "Once you start getting into the categories that are orange, red and dark red, most population groups will not want to be outdoors on those days.”
Other experts are urging all Utahns to do some key things this week.
“If we can turn off your car when you're waiting in the carpool line, not idle as much as possible,” said Jason Brown with Envision Utah, "taking TRAX or FrontRunner or even carpooling or working remotely… those things can reduce a lot of the tailpipe emissions that we typically see coming from cars.”
Unfortunately, this time of year, you may want to turn on your snowblower, but experts say those release a lot of emissions, and they ask that you limit the time you have it on or turn to electric snowblowers — or even a good old-fashioned shovel.
“Flow AQ” is available for free on the App Store for iPhone users and will be available soon for Android.
Other resources and information about air quality can be found at healutah.org/myair.
