The relatively poor air quality over the past week or two is mostly due to recent meteorology conditions. The persistent high pressure over California right now leads to cooler temperatures, a low inversion layer, light winds (no storms), and poor vertical mixing. This meteorology pattern traps our area’s emissions within the area and closer to the ground, leading to higher measured concentrations. Hopefully this will ease up a bit later this week. I have passed along the information that the AirNow site is listing “Fairfield” on the Current AQI and AQI Loop of the “NowCast” values (as in the screenshot below). However, even though the…

Citizen Engineers at the Fenceline <Fix: Add Link>

XRF is an acronym for x-ray fluorescence, a process whereby electrons are displaced from their atomic orbital positions, releasing a burst of energy that is characteristic of a specific element. This release of energy is then registered by the detector in then XRF instrument, which in turn categorizes the energies by element. https://www.bruker.com/products/x-ray-diffraction-and-elemental-analysis/handheld-xrf/how-xrf-works.html