Minnesota air quality today
Across the 3 Minnesota metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Rochester at AQI 24 (Good) and cleanest in St. Paul at AQI 23.
Which Minnesota city has the worst air quality right now?
| # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rochesterno page yet | 24Good | 0.5 | PM2.5 | |
| 2 | Minneapolis | 23Good | 0.6 | PM2.5 | |
| 3 | St. Paul | 23Good | 0.6 | PM2.5 |
What is the UV index in Minnesota today?
The strongest UV in Minnesota today is 3.1 (Moderate) in Rochester, arriving around 12pm local time. The mildest of the 3 metros we model here peaks at 2.7 in St. Paul.
A boreal fire season arriving from the north
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency forecasts fine particles year-round and ozone through the warm season, and issues an air quality alert when the forecast crosses out of the yellow band. That machinery was built for local pollution and now spends much of its summer on smoke made in another country. 2023 set the state record for alert days, most of them for wildfire particulate rather than anything emitted in Minnesota, and at the turn of July into August 2025 the agency ran the longest continuous alert since it began issuing them in 2008.
Position is most of the explanation. Between the boreal forest of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan and the Minnesota border there is nothing to stop or dilute a plume, and northwesterly flow behind a summer front can deliver one in a day. MPCA meteorologists also found something less obvious in the 2023 smoke: it carried more volatile organic compounds than expected, enough to push some alerts into ozone rather than particulate. Smoke at that scale does not only add particles. It changes what else the air can make out of what is already there.
The state runs roughly four hundred miles north to south, wide enough that the edge of a plume can put the north in a warning band while the Twin Cities stay clear. Read a single statewide figure with that in mind.
Where do these Minnesota readings come from?
3 of the 3 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Twin Cities, Rochester Area, Twin Cities. The dominant pollutant across Minnesota today is PM2.5.
We track 3 metropolitan areas in Minnesota, not the whole state, and 2 of them have a page of its own. There is no state-wide average here on purpose: averaging 3 metros into one figure would invent a value for all the ground between them. How we measure, and what we refuse to estimate →
Neighbouring states
Related
Updated