# Indiana air quality today — live AQI by metro > Source: https://breathecheck.com/air-quality/us/indiana/ > Live AQI for 2 Indiana metros, updated hourly from EPA AirNow. Where the state's air is worst right now, and how far apart its cities are. # Indiana air quality today Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC · LIVE 2 metros tracked Across the 2 Indiana metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Indianapolis at AQI 35 (Good) and cleanest in Fort Wayne at AQI 31 . ## Which Indiana city has the worst air quality right now? | # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | | 1 | Indianapolis | 35 Good | 0.9 | O3 | | 2 | Fort Wayne no page yet | 31 Good | 0.8 | O3 | ## What is the UV index in Indiana today? The strongest UV in Indiana today is 6.7 (High) in Indianapolis, arriving around 2pm local time. The mildest of the 2 metros we model here peaks at 6.2 in Fort Wayne. UV is modelled, not measured — unlike the AQI above it, which comes off an instrument. Hour by hour in Indianapolis → ## Steel on the lakeshore, coal on the river Lake and Porter counties, on the Lake Michigan shore, hold a concentration of heavy industry out of proportion to their share of the state. Integrated steel mills sit along that shoreline, together with the BP Whiting refinery, which processes roughly 440,000 barrels of crude a day and is the largest refinery in the Midwest. Sulfur dioxide rules written specifically for Lake County have gone through EPA review, which is a narrower unit of regulation than sulfur dioxide usually gets. Those same counties fall inside the tri-state Chicago ozone nonattainment area, so northwest Indiana’s summer air is planned for as part of a metropolitan region across the state line. The southern edge burns a different fuel. Coal plants line the Ohio River — Rockport in Spencer County at around 2,600 megawatts, Clifty Creek at Madison at about 1,300 — sited on the barge route that supplies them, in a valley cut below the surrounding land. Indianapolis has none of that: no lake, no river trench, no relief of any kind, and its readings run mostly on traffic and on whatever the regional wind delivers that day. IDEM’s Office of Air Quality forecasts daily and issues Air Quality Action Days region by region — northwest, north central, central, southwest and the rest — which fits how little the north and south of Indiana have in common. Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Evansville and the Gary end of the Chicago area read out in the table above and stop there — four different air problems, none of them written up on this site yet. ## Where do these Indiana readings come from? 2 of the 2 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Indianapolis, Fort Wayne. The dominant pollutant across Indiana today is O3 . We track 2 metropolitan areas in Indiana, not the whole state, and 1 of them has a page of its own. 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 Indiana looks wrong the answer is often next door. ## Related Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC