Vermont air quality today
Across the 2 Vermont metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Montpelier at AQI 34 (Good) and cleanest in Burlington at AQI 28.
Which Vermont city has the worst air quality right now?
| # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Montpelierno page yet | 34Good | 0.2 | — | |
| 2 | Burlingtonno page yet | 28Good | 0.2 | O3 |
What is the UV index in Vermont today?
The strongest UV in Vermont today is 4.5 (Moderate) in Burlington, arriving around 12pm local time. The mildest of the 2 metros we model here peaks at 4.3 in Montpelier.
A cold-season forecast written for valleys, not monitors
Vermont publishes something most states do not. Alongside its regular forecast, the Air Quality and Climate Division of the Department of Environmental Conservation issues a separate cold-season outlook for Vermont mountain valley locations, running roughly October 15 to March 1. It rests on meteorological estimates of dispersion rather than on a reading, because what it describes — calm, clear evenings and mornings when cold air drains downhill and settles — happens in places the state has no instrument. The product exists as an admission that the network cannot see the valleys.
What collects in them is largely wood smoke. Work in Rutland found wood smoke a substantial contributor to fine particulate there, with its share rising as the temperature fell, which is the signature of home heating rather than traffic or industry. The division’s open-burning guidance sends residents to that same cold-season forecast before they light anything, and recommends burning in daylight rather than at either end of the day.
The entire state network is four sites: Underhill, Burlington, Rutland and Bennington, and the division has listed the Burlington station as temporarily suspended since February 2024. That is a defensible number for a state this small and this rural, and it is also why a Vermont reading is doing more standing-in than a reading inside a dense network. Coverage on this site amounts to Burlington and little else. For the rest of the state, the nearest monitor is a long way from the valley floor someone is actually standing on, and neither we nor the state has measurements from the ground in between.
Where do these Vermont readings come from?
1 of the 2 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Burlington. 1 is running on modelled values instead, and it is labelled that way in the table. The dominant pollutant across Vermont today is O3.
We track 2 metropolitan areas in Vermont, not the whole state, and none of them has its own page yet — we publish a metro page where searches for it clear a floor, and none here does, though every one is measured hourly. There is no state-wide average here on purpose: averaging 2 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
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