Wake-Up and Breathe the Air Quality Progress/ Update X2
6:00 pm Update: Rockwell hasn't hit 125 ppb yet, but it's hovered in the "red" high teens for three hours according to the latest update from TCEQ, which only goes up to 4 pm. Frisco, Arlington Airport and the old Redbird Airport monitors still seem likely to have their fourth and so, official violation the 1997 ozone standard of no more than 85 ppb for an eight hour stretch.
3:30 pm Update: In the time it took to write this, Rockwall has seen its ozone levels rise to 119 parts per billion. The very old original ozone standard was 125 ppb over a one-hour period. That's considered not just a red alert day – that's getting deep purple. We already had one of those in Arlington in June. Rockwall is on its way.
Original Post:
DFW's luck with the wind has ended.
Breezes have slowed and pivoted to the East, carrying coal plant and natural gas mining pollution. At 11 am the Rockwall smog monitor was already at 91 parts per billion; the next hour it was 111 ppb. The new federal standard is 75 ppb. Now a broad front of five monitors are in the 90's, from Frisco to Arlington. Of those five, two are just one more "exceedance" of the old 1997 standard of 85 ppb – a standard that despite two clean air plans from Austin, DFW has never managed to meet. if they trip today, that would bring the total number of DFW monitors officially out of compliance with that '97 standard to five.
As late as last December, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was maintaining with a straight face that there would be NO MONITORS OUT OF COMPLIANCE WITH THE 1997 OZONE STANDARD. Whenever you'd point out that we just had the worst year for ozone since 2007, or that such a goal would require the lowest ozone levels ever recorded in DFW, TCEQ staff would shrug their shoulders and say, "That's what the computer model tells us," as if that was that. In their own way, TCEQ has become the technocratic equivalent of those who beleive in the inerrent word of the Bible. The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It. Substitute the word "model" for "bible," and you have the philosophy driving the TCEQ response to DFW's chronic dirty air. 
Of course, it matters what variables you put in that model, and how much weight you assign them, and how you run it. And if you're an extension of Rick Perry's permanent campaign machinery. In that case, the model has to say things will get better – because otherwise your critics would say the state needs EPA help to clean up the air; needs to not recommend new pollution control measures – because otherwise it would contradict your anti-government crusade; and needs to ignore the most potent source of new emissions in the last 20-30 years from what is historically the most powerful industry in Texas.
If you have all that going for you, well then why sure, every summer is a new chance to once again prove how the invisible hand of the marketplace can take care of everything. And if it doesn't? Well, it was the EPA's fault for interfering with the marketplace. You can never lose.
The biggest purveyor of junk science in Texas is TCEQ. It's become exactly what it criticizes. Local DFW governments say they are dependent on the agency to provide them with "expertise" they just can't afford. But what's the value of that expertise when: 1) It's always wrong, and, 2) TCEQ is acting directly against local interests by letting ideology trump good science?
In 2010, just one or two monitors were violating the 1997 standard. Last year it was seven. By the end of the day today it could be five. The smog is getting thicker, and TCEQ is playing with its inerrant models.