The Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) steering committee has been meeting at the park this week. They wrap up their work today.
The IMPROVE program is a cooperative measurement effort established in 1985 to aid the creation of federal and state implementation plans for the protection of visibility in Class I areas (156 national parks and wilderness areas), as stipulated in the 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act. The objectives of IMPROVE are:
to establish current visibility and aerosol conditions in mandatory class I areas;
to identify chemical species and emission sources responsible for existing man-made visibility impairment;
to document long-term trends for assessing progress towards the national visibility goal; and
to provided regional haze monitoring representing all visibility-protected federal class I areas, where practical.
Steering committee members represent an array of governmental organizations – the NPS, EPA, US Fish and Wildlife, BLM, NOAA, the Forest Service, and several multi-state organizations. They meet periodically to establish and evaluate program goals and actions.
This week the group is reviewing funding needs, monitoring methods, data collection policy, and data that will be used by states to write implementations plans as required by the regional haze rule.
IMPROVE has also been a key participant in visibility-related research, including the advancement of monitoring instrumentation, analysis techniques, visibility modeling, policy formulation and source attribution field studies.
For more information go to http://vista.cira.colostate.edu/improve/
