RAQSAPI - Objectives of the RAQSAPI package

The Air Quality System (AQS)

The Clean Air act1 requires all federal, state, local and tribal air pollution control agencies monitor ambient air for concentrations of certain air pollutants. Codified in 40 CFR Part 58 are the statutory requirements for these monitoring programs, including monitoring network technical requirements, operating schedules, data certification, data submittal and archiving requirements. In addition to the required air pollution and meteorological monitoring, pollution control agencies often perform additional and/or voluntary air monitoring.

  • The three objectives of ambient air monitoring programs as stated in 40 CFR Part 58 Appendix D.1 are as follows:
    • Provide air pollution data to the public in a timely manner;
    • Support compliance with ambient air quality standards and emissions strategy development; and
    • Support for air pollution research studies.

As required by 40 CFR Part 58, air pollution and meteorological data is submitted to the United States Environmental Protection Agency along with associated metadata and quality assurance metadata via EPA’s Air Quality System (AQS)2.

About AQS Data Mart

AQS Data Mart is a publicly accessible mirror of data stored on the AQS database designed to make air monitoring data more accessible and useful to the technical community, scientific community and the general public. Data on AQS is copied to AQS Data Mart once per week and this data is made available to the public through web-based applications and APIs (application programming interface)3. RAQSAPI functions use the APIs provided by AQS Data Mart to retrieve data.

Benefits of using RAQSAPI

RAQSAPI package for R is a easy to use R package that allows anyone using the R programming environment to retrieve data from AQS Data Mart Database vi the exposed API interface using a set of functions with consistent input variables, function names and output structure. RAQSAPI does not require installation of software or drivers external to R. The goal of RAQSAPI is to make a package which eases retrieving of ambient air monitoring data from AQS Data Mart.

  • Some possible uses of the RAQSAPI package
    • Can be used as part of a monitoring agency’s data validation process
    • RAQSAPI can be used for data retrieval as part of quality management of air data
    • Ambient air monitoring data retrieval for Design value calculations
    • To retrieve ambient air pollution concentrations
      • Useful for retrieving ambient background air pollution data needed model to perform air quality dispersion modeling
    • Data retrieval for automation of Network Analysis
    • Statistical analysis of ambient air data
    • Compare ambient air pollution concentrations from different air monitoring sites.
    • Data retrieval to generate quarterly/audit reports