Air Quality in St. Petersburg, Florida — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across St. Petersburg — with plain-English alerts when summer ozone or Gulf red tide moves in.
AQI 7 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in St. Petersburg, Florida is AQI 7 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 1.3 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 3 to 11. Canairy's verdict: Breathe easy.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is below the World Health Organization's 24-hour guideline of 15 µg/m³. The WHO figure is a daily average and this is a live reading, so read it as a sense of magnitude rather than a formal exceedance — a brief spike and a bad day are not the same thing. More on the WHO guidelines
Pollen today in St. Petersburg: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a moderate level, from Google's pollen forecast. Canairy shows the tree, grass and weed forecast beside the air reading on every plan, including the free one.
Free to download · Live data from PurpleAir & public monitors
Live PurpleAir sensor map for St. Petersburg and Gulfport, Pinellas Park, St. Pete Beach, Clearwater. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in St. Petersburg
The sensors Canairy reads in St. Petersburg agree right now — all 2 sit in the Good band, a 8-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 4.2 mi SSW | 11 | Good |
| 8.2 mi WNW | 3 | Good |
Most of the year, St. Petersburg's air is genuinely fine — the Gulf sea breeze keeps particle pollution low, and the American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report gives Pinellas County passing marks on both short-term and year-round particle pollution. The exception isn't smoke, it's two other things: summer heat and humidity push ozone up on the stillest afternoons, and Gulf red tide blooms, worsened most notably by the 2021 Piney Point wastewater discharge into Tampa Bay, can drift onshore and irritate throats and eyes on windy beach days even when the particle count looks fine.
What Canairy does for St. Petersburg
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for St. Petersburg: open the windows, or keep them shut.
Smoke alerts
A push or text the moment the air crosses your threshold — and again when it clears.
A heads-up before it's bad
Trend alerts catch the air turning, so you can close up the house before the smoke settles in.
Every place you care about
Home, work, the kids' school — across St. Petersburg or across the country, on one screen.
Red tide, not smoke, is St. Petersburg's real air story
In March 2021, a liner failure at the old Piney Point phosphate plant in nearby Manatee County forced the state to pump roughly 215 million gallons of nutrient-laden wastewater into Tampa Bay to keep the containment pond from collapsing. A federal judge later found the site's operator, HRK Holdings, liable for the pollution, and researchers tied the discharge's nitrogen load directly to the severe Karenia brevis red tide bloom that followed in Tampa Bay that summer, which killed hundreds of tons of fish along Pinellas County shorelines.
Unlike wildfire smoke, red tide isn't something a particle sensor reads well — it's an aerosolized toxin that blows off the water and can leave people coughing, tearing up, or short of breath right at the beach, even on a day when the inland AQI looks perfectly fine. Florida Fish and Wildlife samples the Gulf year-round precisely because blooms can flare with little warning and clear just as unevenly, often worse at the waterline than a few blocks inland.
Summer is when the ozone numbers actually move
The American Lung Association's latest State of the Air report shows the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro's ozone ranking slipping to 100th worst out of 226 metro areas nationwide, up from 115th the year before, with the average number of high-ozone days rising to two per year from 1.3. Hillsborough County across the bay carries the metro's only failing ozone grade, a C; Pinellas itself still earns a B for short-term particle pollution and a passing grade for the year-round average.
The pattern behind those numbers is Florida's own weather: long, still, humid afternoons let heat and sunlight cook vehicle and industrial exhaust into ozone before the daily sea-breeze thunderstorms roll in and clear it out. Pinellas County runs its own EPA-approved monitoring network, including a station at St. Petersburg College, specifically to track those pollutants in real time rather than lean on distant readings.
What to check before a beach day or an outdoor workout
Because red tide is patchy along the shoreline, the same afternoon can be clear at North Straub Park downtown and miserable out at the Gulf-front beaches a few miles west. Florida Fish and Wildlife's beach conditions reports and NOAA's respiratory-forecast tool exist for exactly that kind of block-by-block variation, which is also why one citywide AQI number only tells part of the story here.
Canairy pulls from the same PurpleAir and government-sensor coverage Pinellas County itself relies on, so you get one plain-English answer for the places you actually go — your house, your kid's school, the beach you're driving to — instead of juggling a state hotline, a county monitoring page, and a NOAA bloom map just to decide whether to bring the inhaler.
St. Petersburg air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in St. Petersburg right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:08 AM EDT, the air quality in St. Petersburg, Florida is AQI 7 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.3 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does red tide affect the air in St. Petersburg?
Red tide is a bloom of the algae Karenia brevis in the Gulf of Mexico. Its toxin becomes airborne in sea spray and can irritate the throat, eyes, and lungs of people right along the shoreline, even when inland particle readings look normal. The 2021 discharge from the Piney Point wastewater reservoir in Manatee County fed one of the worst recent blooms in Tampa Bay, and Florida Fish and Wildlife still samples the Gulf year-round for it.
Does wildfire smoke ever reach St. Petersburg?
Occasionally. Florida's own brush-fire season, typically in a dry spring, or smoke drifting in from fires much farther away can push particle counts up for a day or two in unusual years. But St. Petersburg's recurring air-quality pattern isn't smoke — it's summer ozone and the Gulf's periodic red tide blooms, which is what the alerts on this page are built around.
What the AQI numbers mean
| AQI | Category | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| 0–50 | Good | Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity. |
| 51–100 | Moderate | Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside. |
| 101–150 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | Kids, elderly, and respiratory conditions stay closer to home. |
| 151–200 | Unhealthy | Skip outdoor exercise. Close windows. |
| 201–300 | Very Unhealthy | Limit time outside. N95 if you must go. |
| 301+ | Hazardous | Health emergency. Stay inside, run filtration if you have it. |
Canairy lets you tighten these bands if you’re more sensitive than the EPA default, so an alert can fire before the official category changes. How to read the Air Quality Index
Where these readings come from
The AQI at the top of this page is the median of the 2 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around St. Petersburg, with outliers set aside so that one sensor brought indoors — or parked beside a barbecue — cannot set the number for a whole city. Every sensor behind it is listed above with its distance and bearing from the city center. There is no black box here.
In the app, a place you save resolves the same way first. When no neighborhood sensor is reporting it falls back to the nearest EPA AirNow monitor, and anything modeled rather than measured is labelled a regional estimate rather than passed off as a sensor reading. How low-cost sensors compare to regulatory monitors
About Canairy
Canairy is free to download. The free plan covers one saved place with live readings, a plain-English verdict, and push alerts when the air crosses a threshold you choose. Paid plans add more places, faster refreshes, and SMS alerts. It is built by two parents in Sonoma County, California, who got tired of guessing whether it was safe to send the kids outside. Why we built it
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Air quality near St. Petersburg
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