U. begins study of pollution

Starting Monday, students at Beacon Heights Elementary will be able to watch scientists work on an air pollution study that someday could influence the way cities are planned.

Researchers will be measuring traffic along nearby Foothill Boulevard and checking carbon dioxide levels. They expect to find the carbon dioxide spiking during the morning and afternoon periods of heavy traffic, when vehicles are releasing more of the gases.

"We're setting up a pilot field study" at Beacon Heights, 1850 S. 2500 East, said Joseph Klewicki, chairman of the University of Utah mechanical engineering department. "We'll have a tower with what's called sonic anemometers."

The devices transmit and receive sound pulses. By gauging how much the wind slows or speeds the pulses, and coordinating an array of the devices, they show wind speed and direction.

Within a little more than a mile from the school, the team also will set up conventional anemometers with whirling cups to check wind speed and vanes to show direction.

All this is a shakedown cruise for a much more extensive, $1.49 million research effort called the Salt Lake Valley Airshed Project. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study began Sept. 1, 2002, and is expected to continue until early 2005.

Fourteen U. faculty members, "a least a dozen graduate and undergraduate student" volunteers and government agency personnel will perform the study, according to a U. news release. They will examine the ways many factors influence Salt Lake Valley's air quality.

"This study is trying to integrate lots of different aspects of pollution," said Diane Pataki, project leader and research associate in the U. biology department. It will record types and levels of air pollution, circulation of air, gases released by vehicles and heating facilities.

It will account for vegetation and the effects of the "urban forest," she said — kinds and amounts of gases exhaled and taken in by plants.

This information will be used to write a computer model that should show in unprecedented detail how the Salt Lake Valley processes air.

"We're trying to involve decision-makers from city governments, the state government, county governments," she said. "They're going to work with us to develop this modeling tool, so we can answer the questions they're interested in."

These queries may include: