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Has pollen got you sneezing? Wondering where that mysterious afternoon haze

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is coming from? How do you find out what's in the air you're breathing?

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For thousands of people each day, the answer's clear...

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... even if the air is not. Just a web click away, it's the Smog Blog.

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[ Ray Hoff: ] "The Smog Blog is a daily diary of

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pollution in the United States. We have students looking at air pollution

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across the country from NASA and NOAA assets, to tell

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public forecasters what's going on in the country."

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And the Smog Blog is not just for weather forecasters. Average Joes

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with hay fever, asthma, heart problems - and those with just a healthy curiosity

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about what's in the air, read the blog to get up-to-date,

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understandable air quality information. The NASA-funded

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team, led by physicist Ray Hoff, gathers ground information

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from their home base at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

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First, they get a real-time view of current air quality

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by using high-tech instruments - like the sun photometer,

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which measures the thickness of the pollution layer...

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... and a laser-shooting instrument called LIDAR.

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It's similar to radar but it uses light instead of microwaves,

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bouncing a laser beam off of airborne particles to gauge the amount

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and kinds of pollutants.

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[ Ray Hoff: ] "The human respiratory system is designed so that most of the big particles

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are all taken out in your nose. They come out in your nasal passages.

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So particles that are smaller than two and a half microns in size, those particles

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get deep into the lungs. And so if you have respiratory problems like asthma,

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or if you have cardiopulmonary problems like you're

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predisposed to having high blood pressure and you could have a heart attack,

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those are the particles that we worry the most about."

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While the ground-based gear gets and accurate picture of what's happening

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today, it doesn't let the Smog Bloggers see into the future.

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For that, they turn to NASA satellites.

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Global satellite imagery lets the Smog Bloggers spot

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incoming particulate matter traveling aloft on air currents, like smoke

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from forest fires.

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[ Ray Hoff: ] "In the West, because of the predominance of forest fires - West and Canada,

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you'll see alot of smoke in the West in our blog posts and

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the kind of iconic pictures that came of the California fires that were

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shown on CNN over and over again, the public really

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latches onto the fact that satellites can tell them what's going at a day-to-day basis

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when they see these large events happening."

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So far, the Smog Blog's had over twenty million hits.

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Followers can watch pollution travel around the world from coal-fired plants,

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desert sandstorms,

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even volcanic eruptions. And for the students who blog?

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More even than a lesson in science, it's a chance

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to connect directly the people their research helps most.

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[ Ray Hoff: ] When you can put together a real-world application at the end of it that

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why it's important that you're doing this, it's alot easier for you to go to class