Take a deep breath. You’re inhaling air that one man calls the “envy of many places on the planet.”

Kevin Warren is executive director of the Parkland Airshed Management Zone, or PAMZ, a non-profit group that monitors air quality in central Alberta and develops strategies to maintain or improve it, when needed.

The group held its annual general meeting at the Abbey Centre in Blackfalds last night.

One metric used to measure air quality is the Air Quality Health Index. It’s a scale of one to 10 and lower the number, the better.

Warren says that the two monitoring stations in Red Deer typically measure from one to three.

“It’s a very simplified indicator that takes input from all the various air pollutants that we are monitoring and converts them into a number between one to 10,” he says.

“What I attribute that to is a lot of the pollution prevention actions taken by oil and gas industries in the area. Also, the fact that we have meteorological systems that sweep the plate clean, so to speak … we have lots of winds that disperse the pollutants.”

As air has no boundaries, an airshed is defined by a group like PAMZ that develops an air monitoring program.

The Parkland Airshed measures about 42,000 sq km, from the B.C. border in the west, to Highway 21 in the east, as far south as Crossfield, and as far north as Ponoka.

PAMZ monitors pollutants such as: sulfur dioxide (from processing of sour oil and gas), nitrogen dioxide (from high-temperature combustion like vehicle emissions), carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, ozone fine particulate matter.

Members of PAMZ are diverse:  they come from municipalities, the energy industry and conservation groups.

A map of the Parkland Airshed.