Local 10 corroborates
Saharan dust passes through, affecting air quality
Exact-date reporting says Saharan dust was passing through South Florida and affecting air quality.
Dust Likely
2022-06-15 to 2022-06-16 Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL dust episode
Daily PM2.5 peaked at 22.5 µg/m³ near Palm Bay across 1 covered metro home to 658,447 people.
Why we think this happened
The basis for “Dust”
Contemporaneous South Florida reporting directly attributes the exact June 15, 2022 haze and air-quality impacts to Saharan dust.
Likely Applicable reporting or a supported inference makes this the best current causal explanation.
Evidence path
From source to city
A cause is more convincing when the record connects three things: something happened, the air mass moved toward the region, and local instruments responded. Here is how much of that chain is documented for this event.
- 1Documented
Source or mechanism
Dust
Exact-date reporting says Saharan dust was passing through South Florida and affecting air quality.
View supporting source ↗ - 2Research gap
Air-mass movement
The transport path has not been reconstructed
The retained record does not yet show how air traveled from the proposed source to these metros. A trajectory replay or dated plume analysis belongs here.
- 3Documented
Local response
22.5 µg/m³ near Palm Bay
EPA monitors recorded the event across 1 metro. The peak daily concentration is roughly 1.0 cigarette-equivalents at the outdoor daily rate.
Inspect the pollutant and weather signals ↓
Event autopsy
What the instruments saw
Before, during, and after the episode: nearby pollutant monitors and surface-weather stations show what changed. This context tests the “Dust” explanation; it does not assign the cause by itself.
Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL
Monitor comparison window 2022-06-12 to 2022-06-19 · PM2.5 target: Melbourne
46% above nearby days
61% higher than surrounding days
Pollution fingerprint
Metro-wide median of reporting monitors PM2.5 22 µg/m³
46% higher than surrounding days
Before16 µg/m³ Event22 µg/m³ After6.74 µg/m³
PM10 67 µg/m³
61% higher than surrounding days
Before43 µg/m³ Event67 µg/m³ After16 µg/m³
Ozone 0.029 ppm
About the same as surrounding days
Before0.024 ppm Event0.029 ppm After0.037 ppm
Atmospheric conditions
Nearby EPA weather observationsAbout the same as surrounding days
Source: U.S. EPA AirData daily observations and, where available, nearby ASOS/AWOS surface observations. Values are descriptive medians over the retained monitor set; missing measurements remain missing. Transport and source evidence remain separate layers because this instrument pattern does not assign a cause by itself.
Measured daily PM2.5 at EPA monitors, as cigarette-equivalents
EPA monitors sit in metro areas, so the colour clusters there. Land between and beyond
them is unmeasured, not clean: this map shows where IAQng has readings, not the extent
of the smoke.
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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.
Views from the selected metro
Camera views near
Select a metro on the map to see nearby cameras. Where an operator archive reaches the event, drag the divider to compare two moments, adjust either date and time, or play the available event-day frames. Camera imagery is visual context, not an air-quality measurement or proof of smoke.
No useful public camera views are currently available within 80 km of this metro.
Affected metros
| Metro | Peak PM2.5 | Cigarettes, whole event | Peak day | All-time standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL | 22.5 µg/m³ | 2.0 | Jun 16, 2022 | #21 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.
Public evidence library
What supports this account
Each card states what a source supports—and what it does not. Official records, research, reporting, community observations, and transparent inferences remain visibly different kinds of evidence.
Saharan dust passes through, affecting air quality
Local 10
Exact-date reporting says Saharan dust was passing through South Florida and affecting air quality.
What it supports
A retained source supports the attributed cause for the stated place and dates.
What remains uncertain
- The classification is bounded to the retained evidence and does not apportion every source contributing to the daily PM2.5 value.
Status and provenance
Likely Applicable reporting or a supported inference makes this the best current causal explanation.
This episode was grouped from the monitor record by the catalog pipeline and given its cause from the evidence listed above. It has not been individually reviewed and signed off, so its boundaries, cause, and name may change as evidence accumulates. Grouping policy common_sense_root_cause_grouping.v2. The cause label reflects the assembled evidence above, not an IAQng detection formula. If it is wrong, tell us.