Tampa, FL Air Quality Index (AQI) Today

Tampa Bay is a wide, shallow estuary and the metro wraps around three sides of it, which gives the local air a daily reversal an inland city never gets. Overnight the land breeze pushes air out over the water; the next afternoon the sea breeze carries much of the same air back across the same neighborhoods. What gets moved around includes whatever is emitted at the waterline, and Port Tampa Bay concentrates a good deal of that. An EPA community air toxics monitoring workplan for the area counted, among the facilities clustered there, seven bulk petroleum distribution terminals, three shipbuilding and repair yards, three cruise terminals and four phosphate fertilizer shipping terminals.

Summer puts a ceiling on what any of that can build into. Afternoon thunderstorms form over the peninsula on most days from June into September and overturn the lower atmosphere, so ozone seldom gets many consecutive hours to accumulate before the day is broken up.

The dry months remove the interruption without removing the reversal. From late winter into spring the storms stop and the bay keeps handing the same air back and forth, which gives a load several days to work with instead of several hours. Prescribed fire on central Florida’s rangeland runs in the same window. Whether a given burn ends up over the water, over Pinellas or out toward Polk comes down to the breeze direction that governs everything else here, and it can settle differently on two consecutive days with nothing else having changed.