Annual regional air quality index statistics for 2006

Ministère de l’Environnement, de la Lutte contre les changements climatiques, de la Faune et des Parcs

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Annual regional air quality index statistics for 2006

In 2006, two new weather regions, Abitibi and Témiscamingue, were added to the list of regions for which the AQI was calculated. This brought the number of regions to 22, since the Montréal Island is divided into 4 subregions.

The percentage of days where the AQI was deemed “good” or “acceptable” varied between 89% on the Montréal Island (approximately 325 days out of 365) and 100% in the Laurentides region (corresponding to 292 days for which AQI data was available for this region in 2006).

For all regions, air quality was often better than in 2005 and 2004. This situation is attributable in large part to weather conditions that contributed to maintaining a good or acceptable air quality.

Only the Montréal Island experienced a percentage of days where “poor*” air quality rose above 10%, to 11.6% (40 days out of 365). In terms of hours, this was 2.1% in 2006 (186 hours out of 8,758 valid hours), 352 fewer hours than the previous year.

As in 2004 and 2005, the further away a region is from Montréal, the better the air quality, regardless of direction.

* Occurs where the concentration of fine particles is above at least 35 µg/m3 (over a three-hour period) or the hourly ozone concentration is above at least 82 ppb at at least one station in the region.