Data and Products of the Regional Deterministic Air Quality Analysis
Regional Deterministic Air Quality Analysis (RDAQA) is an objective analysis of surface pollutants that combines either numerical forecasts from the Regional Air Quality Deterministic Prediction System (RAQDPS), for the preliminary and final products, or from the FireWork Regional Air Quality Deterministic Prediction System (FireWork-RADQPS), for the Firework product, with hourly observations from various monitoring networks in North America, including the Canadian measurement networks operated by the provinces, territories and certain cities, in addition to the various American networks in the context of the [AIRNow] program (https://www.airnowtech.org/index.cfm?page=login) administered by US/EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency). RDAQA analysis provides the best description of current air quality conditions, and is used to inform the public, meteorologists in the various Environment and Climate Change Canada forecasting offices, Health Canada and other users about the distribution of air pollutants near the ground, and the performance of forecasting models.
Each hour, a preliminary product is available approximately one hour after the observation measurement time, while final and Firework products are available approximately two hours after the measurement time. The preliminary and final products contain analysis of the chemical constituents O3, SO2, NO, NO2, PM2.5 (fine particles with diameters of 2.5 micrometers or less) and PM10 (coarse particles with diameters of 10 micrometers or less), while the Firework product contains analysis of PM2.5 and PM10.
Access
How to access the data
This data is available from the MSC Datamart raw data server:
An overview and examples to access and use the Meteorological Service of Canada's open data is available.
Licence
The end-user licence for Environment and Climate Change Canada's data servers specifies the conditions of use of this data.
MSC Open Data Service Usage Policy
The MSC Open Data Service Usage Policy determines what constitutes an acceptable use of MSC Open Data services and provides users best practices for optimal use.
Metadata
Upcoming.
Technical documentation
- Actual version of the Regional Deterministic Air Quality Analysis
- Technical note
- Diagram of dependencies
Changelog
The chronology of changes to operational systems is available in the changelog.