# Florida air quality today — live AQI by metro > Source: https://breathecheck.com/air-quality/us/florida/ > Live AQI for 4 Florida metros, updated hourly from EPA AirNow. Where the state's air is worst right now, and how far apart its cities are. # Florida air quality today Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC · LIVE 4 metros tracked Across the 4 Florida metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Miami at AQI 59 (Moderate) and cleanest in Orlando at AQI 34 . ## Which Florida city has the worst air quality right now? | # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | | 1 | Miami | 59 Moderate | 0.6 | PM2.5 | | 2 | Jacksonville | 57 Moderate | 0.6 | PM2.5 | | 3 | Tampa | 47 Good | 0.4 | O3 | | 4 | Orlando | 34 Good | 0.4 | O3 | ## What is the UV index in Florida today? The strongest UV in Florida today is 9.2 (Very High) in Miami, arriving around 1pm local time. The mildest of the 4 metros we model here peaks at 7.9 in Jacksonville. UV is modelled, not measured — unlike the AQI above it, which comes off an instrument. Hour by hour in Miami → ## A daily storm cycle, and a burning season Florida holds most of the ingredients ozone is built from — heat, strong sun, heavy traffic, a long warm season — alongside a weather pattern that keeps taking the setup apart. From roughly May into September, sea breezes push inland from the Atlantic and from the Gulf and collide over the middle of the peninsula. That convergence produces thunderstorms on most afternoons, and storms mix the lower atmosphere vertically. Ozone needs the opposite: air that sits still through a long sunny afternoon. The hottest months here are also the most vigorously ventilated ones. The dry season, roughly November into May, runs the other way, and it is when fire decides the reading. Prescribed burning is routine land management across the state’s pine and palmetto, and most open burning is authorized not by the environmental agency but by the Florida Forest Service, which sits inside the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Fine particulate from that burning, and from wildfire in the same dry weeks, is the pollutant that moves numbers in a state with no valley to trap anything and no cold season to speak of. Two agencies therefore divide the work: the Forest Service decides when much of the smoke happens, and the Division of Air Resource Management at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection monitors the result and writes the Clean Air Act plans. No Florida metro has a page here yet — not Miami, not Tampa, not Orlando or Jacksonville. Four cities that size each have local sources worth describing, and none of them is described here. ## Where do these Florida readings come from? 4 of the 4 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor . The dominant pollutant across Florida today is PM2.5 in some metros, O3 in others. We track 4 metropolitan areas in Florida, not the whole state, and 4 of them have a page of its own. There is no state-wide average here on purpose: averaging 4 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 Florida looks wrong the answer is often next door. ## Related Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC