The Relationship between Judged Visibility and Judged Air Quality: Results of a Survey

Abstract

Visibility and air quality are usually treated as separate issues since they are governed by somewhat different sets of processes. When people judge air however, they must be influenced by visibility. Despite this, visibility and general air quality have not been studied together in surveys or experiments with human observers. The recent work on visibility has concentrated on visual air quality, neglecting more general air quality The work on judgments of general air quality has neglected separate judgments of visiThe study reported here was performed, in part, to determine the extent to which peoples' judgments of air quality are related to their judgments of visibility. The study was also performed, in part, to determine the extent to which people's judgments of visibility and overall air quality are related to their expectations, to the importance they attach to air and to their experience with various degrees of air quality.