Georgia air quality today

Atlanta’s air problem is a road problem happening on a plateau. The city sits well up on the Piedmont with no coast to send it a sea breeze and no river valley deep enough to channel anything through, and three interstates converge inside it. Warm-season ozone follows. Seven counties around Atlanta were designated nonattainment for the 2015 ozone standard in 2018 and redesignated to attainment in 2022 on three years of certified monitor data, which is a statement about a particular set of monitors over a particular three years and not a permanent condition.

South of the fall line the pollutant changes and most of the fire is deliberate. Georgia landowners put prescribed fire on the order of 1.4 million acres a year, concentrated in the pine country of the southern counties and permitted through the Georgia Forestry Commission. The Commission also runs a public map that carries active prescribed fires and their size, wildfire activity, current PM2.5 monitor readings, NOAA smoke detections and a smoke forecast on one screen — closer to what a reader actually needs on a hazy morning than a single index number.

The Air Protection Branch of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division runs the monitoring network, which it describes as 200 pollutants at 34 sites across 25 counties, and issues a daily ozone and fine-particulate forecast for metro Atlanta, Macon and Columbus across a forecasting season that runs April into October. Atlanta is also the only Georgia metro we have written up. Savannah, Augusta and Columbus appear in the table above and nowhere else on this site.