The American Lung Association has released its annual State of the Air report, which measures how metro areas across the country fare with things like ground-level ozone and particle pollution.

Monroe County got an F in the ground-level ozone category. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given the myriad ozone warnings we get in the summer; the Lung Association says that Monroe County had 19 high ozone alert days. Most of the New York counties surveyed did pretty badly in this category - lots of F's and only a couple of C's and D's.

Monroe fared better in the short-term particle pollution category - we got a C, but we passed. We only had four "orange" days, which means the levels of particle pollution could be unhealthy for sensitive populations: the elderly, children with asthma, that sort of thing.

So why does any of this matter? Well, for one, ground-level ozone and particulate pollution are directly tied to gasoline and diesel vehicle emissions, power-plant emissions (remember, until recently they were still burning coal at Russell Station), and so on. Local and state policies aimed at curbing things like particle emissions or nitrogen oxides emissions - NOx contributes to ground level ozone - could really make a difference.

Second, it's your air and you have to breathe it. And both ozone and particulate pollution are known to cause or aggravate respiratory and circulatory problems.