Jacksonville, FL Air Quality Index (AQI) Today

Jacksonville sits three feet above sea level on a coastal plain with nothing in it to sort or slow whatever crosses. Which quarter the wind is in decides a bad-air day here, and the two quarters that matter both point outside the city.

The Okefenokee Swamp begins about thirty miles northwest, across the Georgia line, with the Osceola National Forest west of the city. Fires in that country burn peat as well as surface fuel, so they smolder for weeks or months and keep releasing smoke at ground level long after the flame front has stopped moving. The West Mims fire of 2017 dropped ash on downtown Jacksonville from that distance. Add the prescribed burning north Florida and south Georgia land managers run through the late-winter dry season, and PM2.5 becomes the pollutant behind most of the metro’s worst readings, on a timescale that resembles nothing about a fast-moving western smoke event.

The second quarter is up the coast, and there the question is smell rather than number. The kraft mills on Talleyrand Avenue gave the city a decades-long reputation for it. The last mill inside Jacksonville now runs on recycled fiber without the kraft process, but two mills still operate at Fernandina Beach on Amelia Island, thirty-odd miles northeast. Sulfur compounds register in the nose at concentrations far below anything that would move a particulate reading, and that mismatch is the one this metro produces most often.