00260 IUPAC Gold Book - ambient air quality 10.1351/goldbook.A00260 A00260 current 1 A general term used to describe the quality of the outside air. Usually adjectives such as good, fair, bad, etc. are used by the media to describe this; often some form of air pollution or air quality index is employed to determine the specific descriptive term to be used. These are very qualitative terms of little or no scientific value. air pollution https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/A00195 air pollution index https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/A00196 PAC, 1990, 62, 2167. 'Glossary of atmospheric chemistry terms (Recommendations 1990)' on page 2173 (https://doi.org/10.1351/pac199062112167) https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/A00260/html https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/A00260/json https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/A00260/plain Citation: 'ambient air quality' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.A00260 The IUPAC Gold Book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for individual terms. If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org . The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is continuously reviewing and, where needed, updating terms in the Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the IUPAC Gold Book). Users of these terms are encouraged to include the version of a term with its use and to check regularly for updates to term definitions that you are using. 2026-05-09T10:12:57+00:00