An exploratory look at hydrocarbon data from the Photochemical Assessment Monitoring Stations network

This paper describes some characteristics of speciated nonmethane organic compound (NMOC) data collected in 1994 at five Photochemical Assessment Monitoring Stations (PAMS) and archived in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Aerometric Information Retrieval System (AIRS). Topics include data completeness, distribution of individual NMOCs in concentration categories relative to minimum detectable levels, percentage of total NMOC associated with the sum of the 55 PAMS target compounds, and use of scatterplots to diagnose chromatographic misidentification of compounds. This is an early examination of a database that is expanding rapidly, and the insights presented here may be useful to both the producers and future users of the data for establishing consistency and quality control.