# North Carolina air quality today — live AQI by metro

> Source: https://breathecheck.com/air-quality/us/north-carolina/
> Live AQI for 2 North Carolina metros, updated hourly from EPA AirNow. Where the state's air is worst right now, and how far apart its cities are.

# North Carolina air quality today

Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC · LIVE 2 metros tracked

Across the 2 North Carolina metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Raleigh at AQI 53 (Moderate) and cleanest in Charlotte at AQI 52 .

## Which North Carolina city has the worst air quality right now?

| # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant |

| 1 | Raleigh | 53 Moderate | 0.5 | PM2.5 |

| 2 | Charlotte | 52 Moderate | 0.6 | PM2.5 |

## What is the UV index in North Carolina today?

The strongest UV in North Carolina today is 7.4 (High) in Charlotte, arriving around 1pm local time. The mildest of the 2 metros we model here peaks at 7.3 in Raleigh.

UV is modelled, not measured — unlike the AQI above it, which comes off an instrument. Hour by hour in Charlotte →

## A 2002 statute, and peat that smolders

North Carolina wrote its main air quality lever into statute. The Clean Smokestacks Act of 2002 required actual emission cuts from the state’s coal-fired plants, and the Department of Environmental Quality reports total nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions down more than 80 percent between 2002 and 2021. On hazy days, most light extinction in the mountains is attributed to ammonium sulfate particles, so the change registered as scenery: DEQ shows it with paired photographs from Purchase Knob in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one taken in 2005 and one in 2016, and how much further the view reaches in the second. Mountain haze here is largely a past-tense story; warm-season ozone across the Piedmont is the present one.

The Division of Air Quality forecasts ozone from March 1 through October 31 and fine particulate year-round. The Triad is the exception — forecasts for Alamance, Davidson, Forsyth, Guilford and Randolph counties come from Forsyth County’s own Office of Environmental Assistance and Protection.

None of that machinery is built for what the coastal plain does. The pocosin wetlands east of the fall line sit on deep organic soil, and when that soil dries out and ignites the fire burns downward into the peat rather than across the canopy. The Evans Road fire, started by lightning in June 2008, burned 41,534 acres of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and smoldered for months afterward; DEQ filed an exceptional event demonstration for what its monitors recorded in Hyde County that June.

## Where do these North Carolina readings come from?

2 of the 2 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Mecklenburg County, Wake County. The dominant pollutant across North Carolina today is PM2.5 .

We track 2 metropolitan areas in North Carolina, not the whole state, and 2 of them have 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 North Carolina looks wrong the answer is often next door.

## Related

Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC