Air Quality Events

The Alberta Ambient Air Quality Objectives (AAAQO) are the provincial objectives for air quality. The Objectives are compared to actual air quality measurements to assess industrial compliance and report on the current Air Quality Health Index. The WBEA reports all detected exceedances of the AAAQO’s Energy & Environmental Response Line. The AAAQO’s relevant to the WBEA’s network can be found here.

Alberta Ambient Air Quality Guidelines (AAAQG) were developed by the province for airshed planning and management, and as a general performance indicator. The WBEA reports all detected exceedances of the AAAQG’s to Alberta Environment and Protected Areas’ Energy and Environmental Response Line. The AAAQG relevant to the WBEA’s network can be found here.

Fort McKay Response Triggers (FMKRT) were developed collaboratively between the community of Fort McKay, Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, the Alberta Energy Regulator, and Alberta Health. They were selected to reflect the needs of Fort McKay to have an immediate notification process in place to respond to air quality events. The trigger levels can be found here.

The status of air quality events is established according to pre-determined levels in AAAQO, AAAQG and FMKRT. The definitions of reported statuses can be found here.

A note about using the Air Quality Events search tool:

The time for both the Start Date and End Date is set to 00:00:00 daily.

When making an AQE data request, users should specify an end date which is one day past the desired date range.

For example, a request for data for January 5^th, 2023, will have a start date field value of “2023-01-05” and an end date field value of “2023-01-06”.