Camila and a community member outdoors inspecting electronics in a clear plastic tub (photograph)

Monitoring at the Miramar Air Show

  • by Rasha Naseif

At the largest military air show in the United States, UC San Diego’s Community Air
Team was there on the ground with TARTA, our air metals sampling instrument, tracking what
the spectacle in the sky mean for the air people breathe. The Miramar Air Show, one of the
largest military air shows in the world, brings hundreds of thousands of visitors to Marine Corps
Air Station Miramar in San Diego each year. Using this year’s event as a natural experiment, our
team ran TARTA for ten days before, during and after the show to see how this concentrated
burst of jet activity might affect short-term metal levels in nearby community air. UC San Diego
team collected fine-particle samples to analyze metals such as zinc, iron, lead and chromium
building on our earlier monitoring a the same site last year. UC San Diego team will soon start
working on analyzing the results from the airshow campaign to better understand what high-
profile regional events, especially military-related activities, mean for everyday quality in
surrounding neighborhoods.