Scientific American

Also helping to get the word out is the “U.S. Air Quality” Weblog-often just called “The Smog Blog”-that is published daily, usually in the late afternoon, Eastern time. Like AIRNow, the blog meshes data from monitors in the sky and on the ground. “The idea is to put all that [air quality] data in one place and put a story together,” says Raymond Hoff, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (U.M.B.C.) and director of the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology. “We aim to be a one-stop shop,” adds Hoff, who has run the Smog Blog with a team of current and former graduate students and other volunteers since 2003. “From a personal perspective, I thought it would be a good teaching tool, he notes, but it turned out to be much more than that.”

Hoff says he cannot believe the number of visitors the Smog Blog gets each day, from amateur astronomers checking nighttime visibility before hauling out their telescopes to academic and government agency officials. “I think [the Smog Bloggers] do a good job showing how satellite data can tell a story about daily air quality,” the EPA’s Jackson says.

Smog Blog Link