If no one from your agency is yet a member of AirShare, click here to request a new agency account.

New user account requests will be activated immediately upon review and approval by the AirShare Webmaster.

Important note: If someone from your agency has already set up an AirShare account, you will need to contact that person and ask them to sign you up as an AirShare user. After you are signed up and the AirShare Webmaster has approved your membership, you will be able to modify your contact information and add other new users from your agency at any time. Requiring new users to be signed up by an existing user at your agency is a security measure intended to ensure that only approved employees at your agency are able to submit items to AirShare.

AirShare is operated by the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District (SMAQMD) for the benefit of the nation's air quality communicators. AirShare was created by SMAQMD under a grant from the U.S. EPA Office of Air Quality and Transportation. Additional funding was provided by the U.S. EPA AirNow program. Our vendor partners on the project were JHME Advertising, Design & Public Relations of Sacramento, CA, and Sonoma Technology Inc. of Petaluma, CA. If you have specific questions about the AirShare project, please contact us at: admin@airshare.info

Contact AirShare at: admin@airshare.info

AirShare is designed to work with the latest browsers from Microsoft or Netscape. To use AirShare, we recommend Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or newer or Netscape 7.0 or newer.

Other browsers may be used with AirShare if they support the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Document Object Model (DOM) specification. These browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and up and Netscape 6.0 and up, as well as browsers using Netscape's Gecko engine, such as Mozilla Firebird. Additionally, recent versions of Opera should work, but we do not officially support the Opera browser.

Notably, Netscape Communicator 4.x and earlier versions are not supported.

If you are using a supported browser but you are having difficulty navigating or using the AirShare web site, please contact admin@airshare.info

The "Upcoming Events" calendar in the blue-trimmed box in the lower-right corner of the home page shows the latest two upcoming national-scale events of interest to those in the air quality field.

Clicking on the words "Upcoming Events" or "More" will take you to a second page that lists additional information for all events in the calendar.

To request that an event be placed on the calendar, contact the AirShare Webmaster at: admin@airshare.info Be sure to include: -Name and sponsor of the conference -Conference date(s) -Conference location -Conference city and state -A one-sentence description of the conference -A conference contact name, phone number and/or Web site for registration information.

With "QuickLinks," you're just one click away from the most useful Web sites an air quality communicator would want to visit. Ten QuickLinks are displayed in the orange-trimmed box on the AirShare home page. Click on the words "QuickLinks" or "More" to go to a complete page of incredibly useful links sorted by category.

To suggest a new link for AirShare's QuickLinks feature, or to report a broken link, please contact the AirShare webmaster at: admin@airshare.info

If you've submitted items to AirShare.info, and want to edit any of them, it's easy! Here's what you do:

1) Click on "My Account" and log in if prompted.

2) Scroll down on the "My Account" page. Your "List of Content" will show everything you have previously submitted to AirShare.

3) From the list, click on the name of the item you want to edit. It's highlighted in blue.

4) When the item appears on the screen, click on the word "Edit", which appears in the second line down on the right side of the form right underneath the AirShare ID number.

5) Edit any parameter you want and then hit the "Go" button when you're done.

There are a lot of useful Web sites out there that would benefit air quality communicators.

It's easy to submit a Web resource to AirShare:

1) Click the "Submit" tab

2) Sign in with your username and password if prompted

3) Select the button that says "a Web resource I would like to share"

4) Fill out the Name, Address/URL, and Description boxes

5) Hit "Go" and you're done!

Communications professionals from local, state and national air quality agencies and air-quality related partnerships can receive authorization to submit items to AirShare.

How to sign up: If no one from your agency is yet a member of AirShare, click here to request a new agency account. New user account requests will be activated immediately upon review and approval by the AirShare Webmaster.

If someone from your agency has already set up an AirShare account, you will need to contact that person and ask them to sign you up as an AirShare user. After you are signed up and the AirShare Webmaster has approved your membership, you will be able to modify your contact information and add other new users from your agency at any time. Requiring new users to be signed up by an existing user at your agency is a security measure intended to ensure that only approved employees at your agency are able to submit items to AirShare.

Is your project hot or not? The blue "What's Hot" display box on the AirShare home page shows the three items in AirShare's searchable database that have been viewed the most by AirShare users. Clicking on any of the items will take you to a second page displaying a list of the 20 most-viewed items in the AirShare database. This page also displays a list of the 20 newest items uploaded to the database.

The blue "What's New" display box on the AirShare home page shows the latest three items that have been uploaded to AirShare's searchable database. Clicking on any of the items will take you to a second page displaying a list of the 20 newest items uploaded to the AirShare database. This page also displays a list of the 20 most-viewed items in the database.

The blue "Today's Top AQI Forecasts" box on the home page displays the cities that are expecting to experience the worst air quality in the nation for the current day. For a complete list of forecasts, click "More" to go to a second page that lists action days, forecasts, and real-time readings for all participating AirNow cities in a sortable list

The blue "Action Days" box on the home page displays the cities that have issued air quality action day advisories. The cities with declared action day advisories expecting the highest AQI levels are displayed first. For a complete list of cities that have issued advisories, click "More" to go to a second page that lists action days, forecasts, and real-time readings for all participating AirNow cities in a sortable list.

The "AQI for City/State" display box on upper right side of the AirShare home page allows you to view the current and forecast AQI levels for any city or region participating in the EPA AirNow program.

You can view the current and forecast level of any city or region by entering either the name of the city or a zip code and hitting the "Go" button.

You can also click on the words "Save Setting" to make sure the current information for that same city automatically comes up every time you open the AirShare site in your Internet browser. Many air quality communicators choose to have the console automatically display the forecast for their own home city or agency.

The console displays, by day, the AQI category (both by color and health descriptor) as well as the pollutant associated with the forecast (ozone or PM).

It is easy to submit news releases to AirShare. Click on the "Submit" tab on the home page, then select select the choice titled "A news release" then click on the "Go" button.

News releases on AirShare are displayed in HTML format. Simply copy and paste the text of your news release from your word processing document or Web site into the Text box on the news release entry page. Use the "Enter" key on your keyboard to put a hard return (a space) between each sentence to make it easy for the user to read.

Enter the following information in the labeled boxes:

-Dateline and State: This is the city and state of origin for the news release, usually the city and state in which your agency is located.

-Headline: Enter a concise headline for the story. This headline should be written so the user can immediately get a sense for what the story is about. Capitalize the first word and user lower-case for all remaining words in the headline, except proper titles, names, etc.

-Run Time: Default selections will display stories on AirShare's home page for seven days or until the story is bumped off the home page and onto the full News page by more recent submissions. You can use the Start Date and Start Time features to "pre-load" news releases in advance and cause them to appear exactly when you want them to appear. You can also select an and date and time.

-AirShare archive: All news releases are active for 30 days. After 30 days, they drop into the AirShare searchable archive by default. If you do not want your story saved in the AirShare archive after 30 days, select the "no" button.

Your agency information will appear with the story so readers will know who submitted it to AirShare. Your contact information is automatically included as it appears in the AirShare membership database containing your account.

Upload file size is currently limited to 10 megabytes. If you have a document to upload that is larger than 10 megabytes, please contact the AirShare Webmaster to discuss.

AirShare members are encouraged to use appropriate file sizes and formats for the documents they wish to share. For example, when submitting a photo or graphic, it will use less storage space on the AirShare server if large TIF files are converted to a JPG or GIF file.

AirShare is not necessarily designed to share massive, printer-ready layered Photoshop or Illustrator project files. It is best to upload reasonable-quality images allowing the user to get a good idea of what your project looks like, and then make separate arrangements to transfer final artwork files to another agency when sharing camera-ready artwork.

An "Action Day" is a day when a local, regional or state air agency issues an advisory asking the public to voluntarily reduce activities that cause air pollution, such as driving vehicles or using wood-burning stoves or fireplaces.

Although AirShare was created as a tool specifically for air quality communicators, the majority of the site is accessible by the general public, including "AirShare Newsroom," "Quick Links," "Upcoming Events," "Search AirShare," and the air quality data displayed on the home page. Some site functions and features are password-protected for exclusive access by air quality communicators, including the "Submit," "Forum," "Find Colleague," and "My Account" features.

Air quality readings displayed on AirShare come directly from U.S. EPA's AirNow program, which provides air quality forecasts and real-time readings from more than 350 cities in the United States. The air quality data are supplied to AirNow by local and state air quality agencies that participate in the AirNow program. All air quality data provided by AirNow and AirShare are preliminary and subject to revision.