Fireworks
2024-01-01 Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX fireworks episode
Daily PM2.5 peaked at 103.1 µg/m³ near Houston across 1 covered metro home to 7.8 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 ≈ 4.1 cigarettes. Across everyone living in the affected metros, that is the collective equivalent of ≈ 32 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 supplied evidence supports fireworks as the root cause of this event. The supplied record does not establish a coherent shared occurrence with neighboring candidates, so the episode remains event-specific.
Affected metros
| Metro | Peak PM2.5 | Cigarettes, whole event | Peak day | All-time standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX | 103.1 µg/m³ | 4.7 | Jan 1, 2024 | #2 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
Agency and publisher pages 1
- Houston rings in New Year's Day with cooler weather. How cool temps get for the first week of 2024 The Houston Chronicle forecast said a New Year's Day inversion was likely trapping smoke from New Year's Eve fireworks close to the surface in the Houston area.
What remains uncertain
- The source describes the inversion as trapping fireworks smoke; it does not establish an independent non-fireworks emissions source.
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.