Smog? There’s an app for that

Just think of it as sigalert.com for your lungs. What the South Coast Air Quality Management District bills as the nation’s first fully featured air quality app for smart phones is now available, free of charge and just in time for the worst of our region’s summer smog season. Enter a location and watch as a little map is bathed in the color corresponding to the air quality there. (In order of best to worst: green, yellow, orange, red or (gasp) purple.)

It also has a cool calculator to determine your family’s carbon footprint, a locator for the nearest alternative fuel station and tips on what you can do to improve air quality. It even lets you drop a dime on polluting vehicles with a feature in which you can record and submit information on that smoke-spewing clunker in the next lane.

Last year, this region had more than 120 days of unhealthy air quality, and things are already on track for a similar number this year, with 46 unhealthy days reported so far, compared to 49 at the same time last year. The villain of the summer smog season is ground level ozone. One of the heroes just might be this app.

Watch a video on how it works here, and download from the Apple App Store.