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This feature class contains the Washington Department of Ecology's Designated Areas. RCW 70.94.6538 requires the Department of Natural Resources to manage smoke impacts from permitted burns in consultation with the Department of Ecology. Permitted burns "shall not cause the state air quality standards to be exceeded in the ambient air up to two thousand feet above ground level over critical areas designated by the Department of Ecology, otherwise subject to air pollution from other sources" (RCW 70.94.6538). The designated areas defined in this layer are areas where fine particulate matter (PM2.5) design values are expected to exceed the Department of Ecology's Healthy Air Goal of 20 ug/m^3, as determined by air quality modeling and monitoring data. Designated areas routinely experience elevated PM2.5 and warrant an additional level of protection from prescribed fire smoke. |
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This feature class contains the Washington Department of Ecology's Designated Areas. RCW 70.94.6538 requires the Department of Natural Resources to manage smoke impacts from permitted burns in consultation with the Department of Ecology. Permitted burns "shall not cause the state air quality standards to be exceeded in the ambient air up to two thousand feet above ground level over critical areas designated by the Department of Ecology, otherwise subject to air pollution from other sources" (RCW 70.94.6538). The designated areas defined in this layer are areas where fine particulate matter (PM2.5) design values are expected to exceed the Department of Ecology's Healthy Air Goal of 20 ug/m^3, as determined by air quality modeling and monitoring data. Designated areas routinely experience elevated PM2.5 and warrant an additional level of protection from prescribed fire smoke. |
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Washington Department of Ecology |
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50000 |
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<DIV STYLE="text-align:Left;"><DIV><DIV><P><SPAN>The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) defines designated areas as areas expected to have 24-hour PM2.5 design values exceeding Ecology's healthy air goal of 20 µg/m^3. The form of the PM2.5 design value is the 3-year average of the annual 98th percentile 24-hour average concentrations. These areas were identified using a combination of model output from the Air Indicator Report for Public Awareness and Community Tracking (AIRPACT-4) forecast model and measured PM2.5 concentrations at monitoring sites operated by Ecology and its partner agencies. All input datasets cover the time period July 2014 – June 2017, which was the most recent continuous 3-year period available with minimal wildfire influence. Wildfire data were not removed completely from the dataset; rather, data were chosen and filtered to minimize the influence of wildfires due to inconsistent model performance and extreme outliers during wildfire periods. </SPAN></P><P><SPAN>Design values were interpolated using the following steps:</SPAN></P><OL><LI><P><SPAN>Median daily AIRPACT-4 forecast PM2.5 concentrations were extracted at 4km grid cell centroids. </SPAN></P></LI><LI><P><SPAN>The ratio between the measured 98th percentile PM2.5 concentration (as a surrogate for the 24-hour design value) and the nearest grid cell's median daily AIRPACT-4 forecast PM2.5 concentration was calculated for each monitoring site. </SPAN></P></LI><LI><P><SPAN>The ratios were interpolated across the domain at 4km resolution using Empirical Bayesian Kriging.</SPAN></P></LI><LI><P><SPAN>Interpolated ratios were multiplied by median daily AIRPACT-4 forecast PM2.5 concentrations to yield interpolated PM2.5 design values. </SPAN></P></LI><LI><P><SPAN>Grid cells with design values above Ecology's healthy air goal of 20 µg/m^3 were extracted and dissolved into smoothed polygons. Only polygons with ≥3 contiguous grid cells were retained due to model uncertainty in small areas. </SPAN></P></LI><LI><P><SPAN>Polygons were overlaid with city, census-designated place, and urban growth area boundaries from 2020 Census TIGER/Line files. Where polygons intersected with any of the above census-defined boundaries, the largest of the intersecting boundaries defines the designated area.</SPAN></P></LI></OL><P><SPAN>Ecology plans to update the designated areas layer at least every five years in conjunction with its 5-year Ambient Air Monitoring Network Assessment.</SPAN></P></DIV></DIV></DIV> |
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Designated Areas for Smoke Planning |
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["Washington State Department of Ecology","ECY","Air Quality Program","AQ","ENV","environment","Health","fine","particulate","matter","micron","PM2.5","designated areas","smoke","AIRPACT","air","healthy air goal","pollution","monitoring"] |
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en-US |
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150000000 |
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