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.

Live St. Petersburg AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering St. Petersburg and Gulfport, Pinellas Park, St. Pete Beach, Clearwater.

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.

Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.

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?

This page shows the current AQI for St. Petersburg, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood or the beach you're headed to.

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 AQI level is unhealthy?

Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0–50 is Good and 51–100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions — and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.

Where does Canairy's St. Petersburg data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across St. Petersburg and surrounding towns, cross-referenced with government monitors and the Google Air Quality API. You can see every sensor behind your numbers on the live map — there's no black box.

Is Canairy free?

Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.