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Important Notes for the:
Whole or Part County County Nonattainment Status by Year Since 1978 Report
The "Whole or Part County Nonattainment Status by Year Since 1978" report was created to show the official annual nonattainment status of each county in 40 CFR 81 as of July 1 since 1978. The presence of a "W" (whole county) or "P" (part of the county) for a year indicates that the whole county or part of the county is nonattainment as of July 1 of that year. The Code of Federal Register is published on July 1 of each year, thus the designation status in the report reflects this cutoff date. For example, if a county is shown to be nonattainment in 1995, it means that on July 1, 1995, the county was nonattainment. If the county had been redesignated attainment on June 30, the county would be listed as attainment in 1995. This matches the snapshot that is taken to create the July 1 Code of the Federal Register each year. Any county not listed has always been designated attainment.
The data in this report for 1978-1987 is based upon work done by Randy A. Becker, Ph.D. at the Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Bureau of the Census. Dr. Becker's database was expanded at EPA to cover the 1988-1991 period. Data after 1991 is based on information in the EPA Green Book, which also contains the associated Federal Register Notices for each nonattainment area.
It is important to understand that this data does not indicate which counties were measuring violations year to year. Only air quality data can be used to show which areas/counties are violating.
The data were checked initially against an EPA 1979 ozone database and a SO2 database which covered all years. Due to the volume of data, there is a possibility of error. It is requested that any identified errors be sent to Butch Stackhouse (stackhouse.butch at epa.gov).
Prior error corrections are included in the 1978-1991 data.