Florida air quality today

Florida holds most of the ingredients ozone is built from — heat, strong sun, heavy traffic, a long warm season — alongside a weather pattern that keeps taking the setup apart. From roughly May into September, sea breezes push inland from the Atlantic and from the Gulf and collide over the middle of the peninsula. That convergence produces thunderstorms on most afternoons, and storms mix the lower atmosphere vertically. Ozone needs the opposite: air that sits still through a long sunny afternoon. The hottest months here are also the most vigorously ventilated ones.

The dry season, roughly November into May, runs the other way, and it is when fire decides the reading. Prescribed burning is routine land management across the state’s pine and palmetto, and most open burning is authorized not by the environmental agency but by the Florida Forest Service, which sits inside the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Fine particulate from that burning, and from wildfire in the same dry weeks, is the pollutant that moves numbers in a state with no valley to trap anything and no cold season to speak of.

Two agencies therefore divide the work: the Forest Service decides when much of the smoke happens, and the Division of Air Resource Management at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection monitors the result and writes the Clean Air Act plans. No Florida metro has a page here yet — not Miami, not Tampa, not Orlando or Jacksonville. Four cities that size each have local sources worth describing, and none of them is described here.