Research and Development to Support the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) - Enhancing the Quality and Scope of Aerosol Data Collection

Enhanced Data Quality Assurance. An essential purpose of the collected data is to assess long-term trends. Identifying underlying causes of trends, especially where they may reflect changes in data quality and planned or inadvertent changes to methods or procedures, helps to ensure that management decisions are based on measurable changes in the atmosphere. The focus of these research tasks is therefore on visualizing, characterizing the quality of, and interpreting network data for trends. Specific tasks include understanding and quantifying uncertainty and detection limits; exploring relationships among data; developing improved tools for monitoring data quality; and promptly identifying measurement issues. Analytical method development. Improving or developing new chemical speciation methods is needed for maintaining and enhancing data quality as technology or scientific understanding changes, can expand the range of data extracted from each sample, and reduce costs. Sampling method improvements. As technology evolves and insights are gained from IMPROVE and CSN network operations, new or modified sampling methodologies are considered for inclusion in one or both networks. Assessments and evaluation of these methods would be conducted at research facilities at UCD and at IMPROVE and/or CSN sites as applicable. Outreach and Communication. Participation by NPS and other units and the site operators is a critical component of network operations, and it is important to keep these key participants informed about the monitoring programs. This will be done through various activities, including sharing of results from the analyses of collected samples with the site operators and other participants and development of training material for site operators and data validators. In addition, results from this work will be shared with the scientific community through workshops, scientific meetings, and peer-reviewed publications.