Wildfire smoke
2021-03-08 Tulsa wildfire-smoke episode
Daily PM2.5 peaked at 79.6 µg/m³ near Tulsa across 1 covered metro home to 1.1 million people. 1 metro recorded their worst day on record.
Counting the extra PM2.5 above each metro's typical day, this event handed the average affected resident ≈ 4.4 cigarettes. Across everyone living in the affected metros, that is the collective equivalent of ≈ 4.6 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
Supplied qualified evidence supports wildfire-smoke as the root cause. The grouping includes only events linked by explicit shared episode evidence; otherwise this remains a single-event episode.
Affected metros
| Metro | Peak PM2.5 | Cigarettes, whole event | Peak day | All-time standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tulsa, OK | 79.6 µg/m³ | 5.3 | Mar 8, 2021 | Worst day on record |
"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
News discovery (GDELT) 1
- Northeastern Oklahoma Air Quality Affected By Smoke From Fires The opened report attributes Tulsa and Okmulgee counties' unhealthy March 8 air to smoke from fires, citing the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality and its health advisory. It corroborates fire smoke but does not distinguish wildfire from prescribed burning or quantify smoke-attributable PM2.5.
What remains uncertain
- The supplied evidence resolves cause but does not establish identity with another candidate episode.
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.