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Air Quality Monitoring Our air quality monitoring sounds good on paper, but...... There are no validated real-time readings. For example, it can take up to four weeks to get a final reading after the filter paper travels from Launceston to Hobart for "conditioning and weighing." The results published on the web site are months out of date. There is something drastically wrong with our air quality monitoring practices, if the high concentrations of forestry smoke only produced two exceedences of our PM10 National Air Quality Standards per year. Outdoor air quality monitoring should be done by an independent body, not by the State Government who own Forestry Tasmania and support the other private forest industries. Tasmanian's are not getting the air quality monitoring they rightly deserve because.... "The reference instruments used at the Divisions monitoring stations is measuring ambient air particulates up to 10 micrometres (PM10) and particulates up to 2.5 micrometres in diameter (PM2.5) do not produce instantaneous measurements. These reference instruments use a technique that requires deployment and retrieval of pre-weighted and calibrated filters, hence the final validated reference PM10 and PM2.5 measurements for a given day are not available for at least a month after that day. However, the air quality monitoring instrumentation installed at Ti Tree Bend station also includes a Tapered Element Oscilating Microbalance (TOEM) that produces a continuous measurement of PM10. The measurements from this instrument and similar instruments at the Hobart and Rowella monitoring stations are now available on the Division's web pages the day after they have been collected. On any particular day the website provides the continuous TOEM PM10 measurements for the previous day together with the continuous and day averaged results for the previous week and for the previous month. I draw your attention to the fact that these TOEM results are only indicative, they are not validated reference results and cannot be used to determine if the Natural EnvironmentProtection Measure (NEPM) daily PM10 standard of 50 micrograms per cubic metre has been exceeded Currently we do not have a TOEM instrument measuring PM2.5 at the Ti Tree Bend
monitoring station, so we are not able to provide a similar service for the reporting of
continuous measurements of PM2.5" Webmaster's Note: TOEM is incorrect. The monitor is a Tapered Element Oscillating Microbalance (TEOM) It is a fact that the 2008 burn season was the worst on record for continuous high density particle pollution and yet Tasmania supposedly only recorded one exceedence of the national standards for PM10 air quality. How could this be? Faulty monitors, faulty monitoring methods, wrongly interpretted results, or deliberate misrepresentation of the readings?
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