# Alaska air quality today — live AQI by metro > Source: https://breathecheck.com/air-quality/us/alaska/ > Live AQI for 2 Alaska metros, updated hourly from EPA AirNow. Where the state's air is worst right now, and how far apart its cities are. # Alaska air quality today Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC · LIVE 2 metros tracked Across the 2 Alaska metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Anchorage at AQI 34 (Good) and cleanest in Fairbanks at AQI 10 . ## Which Alaska city has the worst air quality right now? | # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | | 1 | Anchorage no page yet | 34 Good | 2.2 | PM2.5 | | 2 | Fairbanks no page yet | 10 Good | 1.7 | O3 | ## What is the UV index in Alaska today? The strongest UV in Alaska today is 2.2 (Low) in Anchorage, arriving around 1pm local time. The mildest of the 2 metros we model here peaks at 1.7 in Fairbanks. UV is modelled, not measured — unlike the AQI above it, which comes off an instrument. How we handle UV → ## Fairbanks under a winter lid of its own smoke The state, not the borough, regulates wood smoke in Fairbanks, and that was decided at the ballot box. Fairbanks North Star Borough voters removed the borough’s authority to regulate wood stoves in 2018, which left the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation’s Division of Air Quality to issue the alerts, announce curtailment periods and handle compliance and enforcement itself. There is a great deal to enforce. Fairbanks has hills on three sides, and from October into March it forms temperature inversions strong enough to pin a shallow layer of cold air in place for days at a stretch. Under a lid like that, a modest quantity of emissions produces a large concentration. Home heating supplies most of it: source-apportionment work across Fairbanks winters has put 60 to 80 percent of PM2.5 mass on wood stoves, outdoor boilers and other solid-fuel combustion. EPA designated part of the borough nonattainment for PM2.5 in 2009 and reclassified it from moderate to serious in 2017, with the attainment deadline now at the end of 2027. The controls are correspondingly domestic. Only wood measured at 20 percent moisture or less may be advertised or sold inside the nonattainment area, sellers have to register, and uncertified stoves and older high-emission certified ones had to come out by the end of 2024 or before a property was sold, whichever came first. Summer reverses the geography without changing the pollutant. Lightning-started fires in the Interior’s boreal forest and tundra put smoke over communities hundreds of miles from any flame. Most Alaskan communities sit off the road system and outside any metro this site tracks. What we have no page for, we have no reading on. ## Where do these Alaska readings come from? 2 of the 2 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Anchorage, Fairbanks. The dominant pollutant across Alaska today is PM2.5 in some metros, O3 in others. We track 2 metropolitan areas in Alaska, 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 → ## Related Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC