Air emissions from oil sands development can come from a number of sources including industrial smokestacks, tailings ponds, transportation, and dust from mining operations. Air quality monitoring under the Joint Canada-Alberta Implementation Plan for the Oil Sands is designed to determine the contribution of emissions from oil sands activities to local and regional air quality and atmospheric deposition both now and in the future. Ambient air quality data include:

- Filter Pack (24-hour integrated concentrations of particle-bound SO2-4, NO-3, Cl-, NH+4, Ca2+, Mg2+, Na+, K+ and gaseous SO2 and HNO3 collected daily by the Canadian Air and Precipitation Monitoring Network)

- Total Gaseous Mercury (hourly mixing ratios measured by the Canadian Air and Precipitation Monitoring Network and Prairie and Northern Region)

- Atmospheric speciated mercury (Hg) (2-hour average concentrations of gaseous elemental Hg (GEM), reactive gaseous Hg (RGM), and Hg on PM2.5 (total particulate Hg - TPM)

- Comprehensive set of measurements collected from an aircraft (various time resolutions) covering an area of 140,000 km2 over the oil sands region

- Comprehensive set of measurements collected from the Fort McKay Oski-ôtin monitoring site

- Ozone (hourly mixing ratios measured by the Canadian Air and Precipitation Monitoring Network)

- Ozone Vertical Profiles (ozone mixing ratios as a function of height) measured by the Canadian Ozone Sonde Network

- Aerosol Optical Depth (measure of the degree to which the presence of aerosols in the atmosphere prevents the transmission of light, from the ground to the top of the atmosphere) measured as part of the AErosol RObotic CANadian (AEROCAN) network

- Satellite overpass data have a relatively high spatial resolution over the Oil Sands region to produce images and geo-referenced data of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and sulphur dioxide (SO2) “vertical column density” (which correlates with surface concentration)