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Blowing Smoke in Yellowstone: Air Quality Impacts of Oversnow Motorized Recreation in the Park

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Abstract

Snowmobile use in Yellowstone National Park has been shown to impact air quality, with implications for the safety and welfare of Park staff and other Park resource values. Localized impacts have been documented at several high-use sites in the Park, but the broader spatial variability of snowmobile emissions and air quality was not understood. Measurements of 87 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were made for ambient air sampled across the Park and West Yellowstone, Montana, during 2 days of the 2002–2003 winter use season, 1 year before the implementation of a new snowmobile policy. The data were compared with similar data from pristine West Coast sites at similar latitudes. Backward trajectories of local air masses, alkyl nitrate-parent alkane ratios, and atmospheric soundings were used to identify the VOC sources and assess their impact. Different oversnow vehicle types used in the Park were sampled to determine their relative influence on air mass pollutant composition. VOCs were of local origin and demonstrated strong spatiotemporal variability that is primarily influenced by levels of snowmobile traffic on given road segments at different times of day. High levels of snowmobile traffic in and around West Yellowstone produced consistently high levels of benzene, toluene, and carbon monoxide.

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Acknowledgments

The work presented in this report required an enormous amount of effort from a large group of people. We would like to acknowledge most notably the efforts of Kevin Schneider of the National Park Service, who spent a lot of time working out the logistics and made it possible for us to conduct this research. We would also like to thank John Sacklin, Mary Hektner, Christie Hendrix, and all of the other Park personnel who assisted with the planning and support of this project and several anonymous reviewers of earlier versions of this paper, who offered many helpful suggestions. As always, we are grateful for the continued support of the University of California, Irvine, group, especially Dr. Donald R. Blake, Kevin Gervais, and Brent Love, for canisters and logistical support. We gratefully acknowledge the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for the provision of the HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model and READY website (Draxler and Rolph 2005) used in this research. We would like to thank Dr. Robert Kohrman for planting the seed as well as the financial support for the 2002 study. Finally, we would like to gratefully acknowledge Dr. Robert W. Talbot of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire for the additional financial support necessary to conduct this research as well as the instrumentation that was used in the field for this study. This research received funding from the Planning Office of Yellowstone National Park.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, The University of Montana, Missoula, MT, 59812, USA

    David D. Shively

  2. Department of Geography, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, 48859, USA

    Bruce M. C. Pape & Richard N. Mower

  3. Climate Change Research Center, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, 03824, USA

    Yong Zhou, Rachel Russo & Barkley C. Sive

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  1. David D. Shively
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  5. Rachel Russo
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  6. Barkley C. Sive
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Correspondence to David D. Shively.

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Shively, D.D., Pape, B.M.C., Mower, R.N. et al. Blowing Smoke in Yellowstone: Air Quality Impacts of Oversnow Motorized Recreation in the Park. Environmental Management 41, 183–199 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-007-9036-8

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