Author: /u/princexisor

If anyone is curious about air quality in Houston, here are some excellent resources:

You can view high quality data on Particulate Matter (PM) and Ozone here: https://airnow.gov/ and enter your zip code. This is data from state and federal reference monitors, of which there are a handful of PM monitors and a dozen or so ozone monitors across Houston. This is a good website to check on a regular basis, because Houston has a lot of high ozone days during the summer, and you can save yourself some lung damage by checking these numbers before exercising outside.

This is a map of some low-cost ($230) PM sensors: https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/mAQI/a10/cC0#10.25/29.7637/-95.3631 These sensors are not as accurate as the reference monitors, and the tend to read higher, especially when temperature and/or humidity is higher (they can’t tell the difference between moisture droplets and other, more harmful particulate). But they still provide useful data, and there are more of them in Houston than there are state monitors, so you get a better resolution picture. Plus, you can see thousands of them deployed across the globe. If you are wondering about that one monitor in Houston that’s showing insane PM numbers, that’s on one of the houses behind Turkey Leg Hut.

And if you want dig really deep, there is a truly amazing amount data available directly from the state’s monitoring network here: https://www.tceq.texas.gov/gis/geotam-viewer It’s not the most user-friendly website, but you can view the map of air monitors in Texas and select a monitor to view all of its data, some of which is real time and some of which takes weeks to get processed and posted. This is not limited to PM and ozone, it includes hundreds of pollutants, depending on the location. The data is harder to parse because it is just raw values, and different pollutants are measured in different ways and at different scales, etc. I think a city with this much heavy industry needs better monitoring than we have now, but we do have among the most sophisticated monitoring networks in the country. It’s interesting to see the trace amounts of literally hundreds of different toxic air pollutants just floating around our city. Nobody has ever studied low-level exposure to that many different toxics over a long period of time, but the state has decided that risk is acceptable. And I’ll stop soapboxing because nobody needs more s**t to worry about right now.