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With well over 3 million residents, Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the United States, only New York City is larger. With towering skyscrapers and picturesque mountains looming in the background, downtown Los Angeles makes for a good photo opportunity. On a clear day, that is. Unfortunately, the air quality in Los Angeles is often less-than desirable! In many instances, Los Angeles has the designation as being the "smog capital of the world". Ah, yes, the good ol' Los Angeles smog; that urban-generated murkiness that hangs in the air like a brown blanket. Nothing destroys - or hides - the Los Angeles skyline better than smog. And Los Angeles has plenty of it. With millions and millions of cars belching and spewing their toxic, gaseous fumes into the air everyday, and with countless refineries and manufacturing plants just adding to the problem, it's amazing that Los Angelenos are still treated to blue skies every now and then. Yes, Los Angeles is well-known for many things - traffic, crime, gangs, e.t.c. - but the one thing that seems to be most associated with Los Angeles is smog! Everybody knows about Los Angeles smog, but what causes it? Why is Los Angeles so cursed with this air pollution problem when so many other big cities throughout the nation are not? Well, there are some very good reasons, actually.

A big contributing factor to Los Angeles being near the top of the nation's smoggiest places - Los Angeles and Houston, Texas, being the two top contenders for the nation's smoggiest city- is climate-related. Los Angeles, for all of its great weather and sunshine, has to put up with something called an inversion layer. A common occurrence in the Summer, a time when Los Angeles experiences its worst air quality, an inversion layer is nothing more than an area of the atmosphere where the normal cooling of air temperature with increasing elevation slows down or even reverses. Normally, air temperature cools down rapidly as you climb higher and higher up into the atmosphere. With an inversion layer, the air temperature will cool off much slower than normal or the temperature will actually increase as you gain altitude. What this does is cause a layer of warmer air to cover the colder air below it; the inversion layer acts like a lid on whatever is underneath it - in this case air! What happens is that in a place like Los Angeles, with its 3million plus residents and millions and millions of cars on the road, all that noxious gas and pollution gets

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