Air Quality in Tampa, Florida — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Tampa — with free alerts the moment the air turns.

Live Tampa AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Tampa and St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Brandon, Temple Terrace.

Tampa Bay has one air quality problem that almost nowhere else in the country has: a bloom in the water that makes it hard to breathe on land. When Karenia brevis blooms off the Gulf coast, wave action breaks the cells open and releases brevetoxins into the air, and people onshore start coughing. The bloom that began in October 2017 stretched from Pinellas County to Collier County by mid-August 2018, more than 150 miles of coast, and did not dissipate until the winter of 2018 into 2019. Away from that, the region's air is good by national standards — no Florida county is currently designated nonattainment for any federal pollutant — though Hillsborough County spent most of the 2010s on the EPA's list for lead before it was cleaned up.

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 is the one air problem that comes out of the water

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is direct about the mechanism: wave action can break open K. brevis cells and release toxins into the air, leading to respiratory irritation — coughing, sneezing, and irritation of the eyes, nose and throat. Blooms most often form in late summer and early fall and can persist through winter into spring. Children, older adults, people who are immunocompromised and anyone with a chronic respiratory condition are the ones most likely to have a bad time with it. A study of the 2001 bloom around Sarasota found coastal residents had a 54 percent higher rate of respiratory emergency room admissions than inland residents during the bloom, with increases of 44 percent for asthma, 56 percent for bronchitis, 64 percent for upper airway disease and 31 percent for pneumonia. The effect was concentrated in people living within about 1.6 kilometres of the shore.

Geography matters a lot here. The irritation is a surf-zone phenomenon, so the Pinellas beaches — Clearwater, St. Pete Beach — feel it long before anywhere inland does, and downtown Tampa on Hillsborough Bay is a different situation from the open Gulf. But blooms do get into the bay. After the Piney Point phosphate reservoir discharged around 215 million gallons of wastewater into Tampa Bay starting on 30 March 2021, a red tide bloom followed that summer and roughly 600 tons of dead fish were pulled off St. Petersburg's shoreline. That is the case where a bay-side neighbourhood, not just a beach, gets the smell and the cough.

The lead plant that put Hillsborough County on the EPA's list

Hillsborough County has an industrial air history that Miami and Orlando do not. It was designated nonattainment under the 2008 federal lead standard and stayed on the list from 2010 through 2017, the source being the Envirofocus Technologies secondary lead facility. The fix was physical rather than paper: the plant installed controls to cut lead emissions, added dust suppression for soils and vehicle traffic around the site, and was completely enclosed to stop fugitive emissions escaping. The EPA announced approval of the redesignation to attainment on 11 September 2018.

That was not the county's only listing. Hillsborough also had two sulfur dioxide nonattainment areas under the 2010 standard, redesignated on 12 December 2019 and 23 March 2020, and it was one of six Florida counties designated nonattainment under the old one-hour ozone standard back in the 1990s. All of those are now resolved, which is the honest headline. What it leaves behind is a working port and industrial corridor along Hillsborough Bay, where a plant upset or a fire is a local event long before it is a regional one — the sort of thing a nearby sensor catches and a county-level number smooths away.

Burn season and the summer dust

Florida runs one of the most active prescribed fire programmes in the country. In an average year the Florida Forest Service issues about 88,000 authorisations covering more than 2.1 million acres, and burning goes on all around the Tampa Bay region's inland edge — the pine flatwoods and ranchland east and north of the city. A prescribed burn is planned, permitted and generally short-lived, but the smoke is real while it is happening, and it settles into low ground overnight when the air stops moving.

The other seasonal visitor is Saharan dust. Between mid-June and mid-August, plumes leaving Africa every three to five days cross the Atlantic in the Saharan Air Layer and reach the Gulf coast. The record case was June 2020, when the so-called Godzilla plume produced the most intense dust episode in two decades: on 27 June about 40 percent of EPA monitors across nine southern states exceeded the 35 microgram daily PM2.5 standard, and the single highest US reading was 73.9 micrograms per cubic metre at St. Marks, up the Gulf coast in Florida's Big Bend. The same dry layer suppresses thunderstorms, so a dusty week on the Gulf tends to be a hot, still, hazy one.

Tampa air quality FAQ

Why is there smoke in Tampa today?

Three things produce hazy air here and they behave differently. Prescribed burns on the inland side of the region are the most common: Florida issues around 88,000 burn authorisations a year covering more than 2.1 million acres, and that smoke has a direction, a smell, and usually clears within a day. Saharan dust between mid-June and mid-August hazes the whole sky evenly with no smell and turns the sun orange. And if you are near the Gulf beaches and your throat is burning without any visible haze at all, that is more likely red tide than smoke.

What is the air quality in Tampa right now?

This page shows the live AQI for Tampa, calculated from PurpleAir sensors around the city and updated continuously. Sensor coverage on this side of the bay is decent but not dense, so the reading is drawn from a wider area than in a big northern metro. If you live near the Gulf beaches or out toward Brandon, saving those specific spots will give you something more useful than a single Tampa number.

Can red tide really make it hard to breathe?

Yes, and it is well documented rather than anecdotal. Wave action breaks open Karenia brevis cells and releases brevetoxins into the air, producing coughing, sneezing and irritation of the eyes, nose and throat. During the 2001 bloom near Sarasota, coastal residents had a 54 percent higher rate of respiratory emergency room admissions than inland residents, with asthma admissions up 44 percent. If you have asthma or COPD and the beach makes you cough, that is a real signal to go inland rather than push through it.

Will a PurpleAir sensor detect red tide?

Not directly. A PurpleAir sensor measures fine particles, PM2.5, and brevetoxin aerosol is a different thing — a bloom can be irritating your throat while the AQI on this page reads Good. For red tide specifically, the beach condition reports and FWC's bloom status maps are the right sources. What this page is good for is everything else: burn smoke, Saharan dust, and any local particle event, where a live PM2.5 number tells you exactly what you need to know.

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.

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.