Oklahoma air quality today

Oklahoma’s air quality warning passes through a regional planning body before it reaches anyone. The Department of Environmental Quality issues an Ozone Alert or a PM Alert when the next day’s forecast is expected to be unhealthy for sensitive groups or worse, then notifies local councils of government, which distribute it: the Indian Nations Council of Governments in Tulsa, the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments in Oklahoma City, Clean Air Lawton in the southwest. The state forecasts and someone else does the telling.

Spring belongs to the Flint Hills. That tallgrass prairie tallgrass prairie runs south out of Kansas into Osage County, and ranchers on both sides of that line burn roughly two million acres of it in a typical spring to renew grazing. Kansas has used air quality modeling to show that emissions from this burning can push ozone in downwind cities past the federal standard, and the smoke has been confirmed to reach communities in Kansas and Missouri — part of this pollution leaves Oklahoma rather than settling on it.

Wind supplies the third mechanism, and DEQ added instrumentation specifically for it: a continuous PM10 monitor at Weatherford in western Oklahoma, placed to identify and track the dust storms that accompany high-wind events. The counties around it are open, tilled and dry for part of every year, which is the condition those events need. None of Oklahoma’s metros has a page here yet, so the table above is all we can offer on its cities.