Why was Maine broken into the eight Air Quality Forecasting regions?
For years we had three forecast regions: Coastal, Interior and Northern. As we learned more about how Ozone and Particle Pollution behaved in Maine it became apparent that the three regions were not adequate. They were fairly good for Ozone, but not good at all for Particle Pollution. So we refined and subdivided the former regions using the monitoring data for both pollutants and our best judgement. We created seven major forecast regions which display in the table as well as on the forecastmaps. This gives us more flexibility in issuing a graphical forecast and better descriptive and consistent regional terms to use in the text and hot line messages. Of course, it also pushes us to do better and refine our forecasting knowledge. Who knows, in the years to come we may realize these seven major regions need to be revised, especially as we learn more about how pollution behaves in our northern areas. In addition to the seven major forecast regions, we’ve added a region called ‘High Elev
