On September 1st, 2022, a regulation (DEC Regulations, 18 AAC 50, Air Quality Control, amended 09/07/22) came into effect, which requires lower sulfur in heating fuel oils used in FNSB. The goal of this regulation is to reduce wintertime air pollution. Most of the sulfur in fuel becomes SO2 upon combustion, so we can observe the air clean up as a reduction in SO2. Therefore, we made this website to display SO2 for winter 2022/23 as compared to historical (2014/15-2021/22) average and variability to observe, in real time, the effect of fuel oil sulfur regulations in Fairbanks, Alaska. These SO2 data are preliminary measurements made by Alaska DEC at the NCORE site, which are re-plotted against historic data from that site.

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