# Alabama air quality today — live AQI by metro > Source: https://breathecheck.com/air-quality/us/alabama/ > Live AQI for 2 Alabama metros, updated hourly from EPA AirNow. Where the state's air is worst right now, and how far apart its cities are. # Alabama air quality today Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC · LIVE 2 metros tracked Across the 2 Alabama metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Birmingham at AQI 93 (Moderate) and cleanest in Huntsville at AQI 52 . That is a 41 -point spread inside one state — a state-level number would hide it, which is why this page does not publish one. ## Which Alabama city has the worst air quality right now? | # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | | 1 | Birmingham no page yet | 93 Moderate | 1 | O3 | | 2 | Huntsville no page yet | 52 Moderate | 1 | PM2.5 | ## What is the UV index in Alabama today? The strongest UV in Alabama today is 8 (Very High) in Birmingham, arriving around 1pm local time. The mildest of the 2 metros we model here peaks at 7.9 in Huntsville. UV is modelled, not measured — unlike the AQI above it, which comes off an instrument. How we handle UV → ## Furnaces in Jones Valley, ozone in the heat Birmingham grew where iron ore, coal and limestone lay within a few miles of one another, and the furnaces that followed were built at the bottom of Jones Valley, a trough at the southwestern tail of the Appalachians. Emissions from coke plants, foundries and pipe works entered the air at the valley floor rather than above the ridges. Part of that legacy is still being dug out: at EPA’s 35th Avenue Superfund site in north Birmingham, contaminated soil has been removed from more than 650 properties in the Collegeville, Fairmont and Harriman Park neighborhoods after sampling found arsenic, lead and benzo[a]pyrene, and EPA named nearby coke oven plants, steel producers and pipe manufacturers among the potential contributors by way of airborne deposition. EPA designated Jefferson County nonattainment for ozone in 1978 and added Shelby County in 1991. The Birmingham area was redesignated to attainment for the 8-hour ozone standard in 2006 and designated attainment for the 2006 24-hour PM2.5 standard in 2013. What persists is a split in who forecasts what: the Alabama Department of Environmental Management forecasts ozone from March through October, while the Jefferson County Department of Health forecasts PM2.5 year-round for the Birmingham area. Two agencies, two pollutants, two calendars, one metro. The rest of the state runs on heat rather than terrain. Long, humid summers over heavily forested country favor ozone formation, and the large sources outside Birmingham — paper, chemicals, the port complex at Mobile — are spread out rather than stacked in one bowl. Where this site has no page for an Alabama metro, that is a fact about our coverage. Nobody checked those places and found them clean. ## Where do these Alabama readings come from? 2 of the 2 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Birmingham, Huntsville. The dominant pollutant across Alabama today is O3 in some metros, PM2.5 in others. We track 2 metropolitan areas in Alabama, 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 Smoke and inversions do not stop at a state line, so when Alabama looks wrong the answer is often next door. ## Related Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC