Ozone Monitoring

Purpose: The USDA Forest Service, Air Resource Management (ARM) program continues work on determining the impact of ground-level ozone on vegetation growing within the National Forests and in areas federally designated as Class I according to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. The cumulative ozone exposures W126 (Lefohn and Runeckles, 1987) and the number of hours of greater than or equal to 0.100 ppm (N100) are the two statistics used by the ARM program to evaluate which areas of the National Forests are receiving the greatest ozone exposures, and they are inputs into equations which estimate the maximum biomass reduction for a growing season. The frequency of ozone monitoring on or near National Forest lands, or near Class I areas varies in the United States. However, the use of the statistical extrapolation technique called kriging has been used successfully to estimate ozone exposures between ozone monitors (Lefohn et al., 1997). The purpose of this project is to obtain seasonal (April through September) estimates for the year 2010 of both the W126 and N100 for all of the lower 48 states at predetermined coordinates that are spaced at 0.5 degrees latitude by 0.5 degrees longitude. Duties: The Contractor shall employ experienced personnel who have demonstrated the ability to conducted studies using ground-level ozone monitoring data, have published reports on how to summarize ozone monitoring data from EPA AIRS network and other sources, and have published results where the methods of ozone spatial extrapolations are accepted by the scientific community. Contractor will be required to provide an electronic copy of all the AIRS, CASTNET, and other sites included in the analysis along with the initial and modeled W126 and N100 values, the fourth highest 8 hour average ozone value, and the maximum seasonal hourly average ozone value by August 30, 2011. The Contractor will also be required to provide the kriging results for the specified coordinates to the Forest Service Representative by September 5, 2011. A report will be prepared describing the kriging methods (including how missing data were substituted), which of the AIRS, CASTNET, and other sites were removed from the analysis, and a description of the kriging results. The report should be written so a person with a high school education can fully understand the contents. Furthermore, the contractor must work with COR in order to transfer electronic copies of the characterized database and kriged results so the USDA Forest Service NRIS database can be updated. Contractor needs to finish all tasks listed below within 100 days after the final contract has been issued.