Weather Whys; Fresh Air

This is weather-wise. If you live in a crowded urban or sub-urban area, you might think the country is the only place to get a good breath of fresh air. In some cities, the air seems absolutely full of smog, automobile exhaust, and all sorts of other things you don't want in your lungs. Asmuss sufferers may have a hard time living in the city, and people with emphysema and other pulmonary illnesses may have difficulties as well. For more than a century, people with ailments like those were sent away for the country cure, and even today some find breathing to be significantly easier away from the fumes and pollution of the city. But what exactly constitutes that fresh air you find out in the country? Do you think of it as air that's wholly clean, that's never been touched by any impurity and which certainly hasn't been breathed by anyone else? If so, listen closely. Even in its purest form, air contains not only oxygen, but all sorts of trace gases, like argon and xenon, that you might not think you'd want to breathe.

The gases that make up Earth's atmosphere may have come from supernovas elsewhere in our galaxy at one time, and out of Earth's own volcanoes at another. Less picture-escalate, scientists now realize that some gases are even provided to the atmosphere as a byproduct of the intestinal activity of bovine ruminants, otherwise known as cows. Furthermore, the atmosphere acts something like a giant but relatively slow blender. Over long periods of time, it does a very efficient job of mixing itself up. So country or city, the air you breathe is never as pure as you might like to imagine. Weather-wise is produced with the assistance of the National Weather Service Forecast Office and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, both in Norman, Oklahoma, and is made possible through a grant from the National Science Foundation. For Weather-wise, I'm Drew Barlow.