Heartland Air Monitoring Partnership (HAMP) uses a portable station to determine air monitoring needs in the Airshed and capture data that characterizes air quality in the communities it serves.
Between February 2023 to January 2024, the Keith Purves Portable (KPP) Station collected air quality measurements in the Hamlet of Newbrook. The 12-month project showed Newbrook’s Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) was a low risk to health more than 87% of the time – slightly more often than six other Airshed communities compared in the report.
The slightly better rating suggests Newbrook was less affected by the spread of wildfire smoke across the Airshed than other areas. Overall, however, air quality results show Newbrook experiences very similar air quality to other Airshed communities during regional air quality events such as wildfires and wintertime temperature inversions. Newbrook’s air quality was a moderate risk to health 8% of the time and a high or very high risk to health just over 4% of the time during the project.
In addition to determining the effects of regional air quality events, the portable monitoring project also sought to determine:
- The possible influence of emissions near the hamlet (such as a Class II landfill 5 km away); and
- The long-range effects of air contaminants when winds are blowing from the Edmonton Metropolitan Area and the Industrial Heartland, given Newbrook’s location near HAMP’s northern boundary.
Data analysis showed that when the wind was coming from the southeast quadrant of the Airshed (where most emission sources are located) levels of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter still remained well below provincial objectives for the vast majority of the time. Nor were landfill emissions found to have any appreciable impact on the local air quality.
Learn all of the data findings for Newbrook in the full report.