Texas air quality today

Texas is wide enough that its air problems share an agency rather than a mechanism. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality publishes a daily air quality forecast that has to speak to all of them at once, and on one afternoon it can call moderate ozone for Dallas-Fort Worth, good air for Houston, and dust pushing the particulate index up around El Paso.

Three metros now carry the same federal designation, and the state asked for it. In June 2024 EPA granted a request from the governor of Texas to voluntarily reclassify San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston-Galveston-Brazoria from moderate to serious ozone nonattainment under the 2015 standard, effective that July; a bump-up resets the attainment deadline and brings tighter control requirements with it. Dallas-Fort Worth assembles its ozone the way most large inland metros do, out of traffic, heat and stagnant summer afternoons over flat ground. Houston works from a different inventory, since the petrochemical complex along the ship channel releases light, highly reactive hydrocarbons alongside the nitrogen oxides that arrive with the freight, and that combination lets ozone form faster and nearer its source than inland chemistry does. The Gulf supplies the last piece: an afternoon sea breeze that can push a morning’s emissions back over the ground that produced them.

West Texas runs on particles instead. Dust carried off the Sahara reaches the far western corner in summer and lifts fine particulate at the El Paso monitors, and TCEQ forecasts also flag industrial activity across the Permian Basin as a regional source of the same pollutant. A reading in Midland and a reading beside the ship channel answer different questions on one scale.