By Michael Hawthrone
Weeks of clear skies over Los Angeles (click here), New Delhi, Wuhan and other smoggy, soot-choked cities are signs of how the coronavirus lockdown improved air quality around the planet.
Animated satellite maps and daily reports from monitoring networks back what people see with their own eyes. In city after city, levels of lung-damaging, life-shortening pollution dropped abruptly as COVID-19 restricted daily commuting and grounded national economies to a halt.
But for reasons that have yet to be fully explained, people in Chicago and its suburbs aren’t breathing dramatically cleaner air during the pandemic.
Average daily soot concentrations in the region declined by only 1% last month compared with April 2019, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis of federal and state monitoring data....
To the right is a picture from 2016. The air in Chicago still looks better today than in 2016.July 27, 2016
By Rueben Unrae
In response (click here) to the National Weather Service’s air quality alert, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has declared an Air Pollution Action Day for the Chicago area on Wednesday....
