Wildfire smoke
2007-05-08 wildfire smoke episode affecting Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL
Daily PM2.5 peaked at 53.9 µg/m³ near Miami across 1 covered metro home to 6.5 million people. 1 metro placed a top-ten day in their record.
Counting the extra PM2.5 above each metro's typical day, this event handed the average affected resident ≈ 3.7 cigarettes. Across everyone living in the affected metros, that is the collective equivalent of ≈ 24 million cigarettes. An awareness illustration of outdoor exposure at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette (Berkeley Earth), counting only the event's ranked days; not a medical dose.
Episode peak
-- cigarettes
The smoke map's scale, replayed over this event: the surface interpolates between covered metros' daily records, framed to the affected region. Hover for a reading, click a metro to pin it to the card. Days a monitor did not report draw nothing.
What happened, in the record
Qualified frozen causal evidence supports wildfire smoke as the broad root cause.
Affected metros
| Metro | Peak PM2.5 | Cigarettes, whole event | Peak day | All-time standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 53.9 µg/m³ | 4.5 | May 8, 2007 | #7 of its top days |
"Cigarettes, whole event" totals a metro's ranked event days at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette: what a person outdoors there breathed across the event, as the illustration. "All-time standing" is where this episode's days sit in each metro's ranked record (worst-area measure, since 1999). Full local context is on each metro's Air Records page.
The evidence
Official records
- NOAA Storm Events Dust Storm, ARIZONA, May 8, 2007 "Dense blowing dust resulted in very low visibility late in the afternoon and early evening. At least one accident was reported and power lines were downed in the Casa Grande area." record →
EPA AQS monitor qualifier 2
- AQS PM2.5 qualifier RT — Wildfire-U. S. EPA AQS carries an agency-submitted request-exclusion qualifier (RT, Wildfire-U. S.) on 8 PM2.5 samples in the candidate CBSA on 2007-05-09, identifying wildfire smoke as affecting the samples. A request-exclusion qualifier is an official submitting-agency causal claim, but this endpoint does not establish EPA concurrence.
- AQS PM2.5 qualifier RT — Wildfire-U. S. EPA AQS carries an agency-submitted request-exclusion qualifier (RT, Wildfire-U. S.) on 3 PM2.5 samples in the candidate CBSA on 2007-05-08, identifying wildfire smoke as affecting the samples. A request-exclusion qualifier is an official submitting-agency causal claim, but this endpoint does not establish EPA concurrence.
Agency and publisher pages 2
- Incident Management Situation Report, May 17, 2007 The federal incident report documents large active wildfires in Florida and Georgia during this May episode, but does not provide source attribution for Miami PM2.5.
- Fires in Georgia and Florida NASA documents the Bugaboo Fire beginning in the Okefenokee Swamp in early May and spreading south into Florida. It establishes a contemporaneous wildfire source but does not assess the Miami candidate's PM2.5.
What remains uncertain
- AQS qualifiers are submitting-agency causal flags and do not by themselves establish EPA concurrence.
Status and provenance
Research preview: this record carries research-only status and its boundaries, cause, and name may change as evidence review completes. Grouping policy common_sense_root_cause_grouping.v2. The cause label reflects the assembled evidence above, not an IAQng detection formula.