U.S. Air Quality

Code Yellow and Orange Ozone in the Central Plains, Texas, Florida, and California

As we transition into warmer temperatures, ozone monitors across the country today registered some code yellow (moderate) and code orange (unhealthy for sensitive groups) readings. The code orange ozone levels were found in inland portions of California, and Oklahoma. See today’s AIRNow ozone map, below left. AIRNow showed mostly good (code green) PM2.5 levels, with the exceptions being the Central Plains and parts of California (below right).

NOAA’s HMS Fire and Smoke Product (below left) shows a plethora of fires in the Central Plains, which likely impacted ground-level air quality causing the slightly elevated PM2.5 levels recorded in this region. The HMS analyst identified two areas of smoke - an area of
smoke moving eastward across New Mexico into western Texas, believed to be from an intense fire burning yesterday in central New Mexico, and a swath of haze extended from North Dakota and Minnesota to the Middle Mississippi Valley, with possible contributions from agricultural fires in Kansas and Oklahoma. The Terra MODIS true color image (below right) of the nation today is a striking, relatively cloud-free image, with no obvious evidence of smoke or haze at this scale. Neither the Terra nor Aqua AOD products, nor the NASA Rapidfire subsets of true color images were available at the time of this posting to explore areas of potential interest further.