23 



PROTECTING VISIBILITY IN NATIONAL PARKS AND WILDERNESS AREAS 



Statement of 



Warren H. White 



Chemistry Department 



Washington University 



before the 

 Subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources 

 Committee on Government Operations 

 U.S. House of Representatives 



29 April 1994 



Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. I am here to 

 summarize the general conclusions and recommendations of the Committee on Haze 

 in National Parks and Wilderness Areas, on which I served. Our committee was 

 convened by the National Research Council at the beginning of 1990, and 

 included people knowledgeable in meteorology, atmospheric chemistry and 

 optics, air pollution monitoring and modeling, statistics, control technology, 

 and environmental law and public policy. The Research Council is the 

 operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences, chartered by Congress in 

 1863 to advise the government on matters of science and technology. 



The Haze Committee was charged to develop working principles for assessing the 

 relative importance of anthropogenic emission sources that contribute to haze 

 in Class I areas and for considering various alternative emissions control 

 measures. An interim report published in 1990, Haze in the Grand Canyon, 

 evaluated the National Park Service's Winter Haze Intensive Tracer Experiment 

 (WHITEX) . Our final report, Protecting Visibility in National Parks and 

 Wilderness Areas, was published in 1993. The committee's work was sponsored 

 by the U.S. Department of the Interior (National Park Service, Bureau of 

 Reclamation, and Office of Environmental Quality), U.S. Department of Energy, 

 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture (Forest 

 Service), the Arizona Salt River Project, and Chevron Corporation. 



The complete design of a program for protecting and improving visibility in 

 national parks and wilderness areas must involve many policy issues that 

 trancend science and the committee's expertise. However, present scientific 

 knowledge about visibility impairment has several important implications for 

 policy makers seeking to approach the national goal of remedying and 

 preventing man-made visibility impairment in Class I areas. 



