# West Virginia air quality today — live AQI by metro > Source: https://breathecheck.com/air-quality/us/west-virginia/ > Live AQI for 2 West Virginia metros, updated hourly from EPA AirNow. Where the state's air is worst right now, and how far apart its cities are. # West Virginia air quality today Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC · LIVE 2 metros tracked Across the 2 West Virginia metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Huntington at AQI 36 (Good) and cleanest in Charleston at AQI 30 . ## Which West Virginia city has the worst air quality right now? | # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | | 1 | Huntington no page yet | 36 Good | 0.7 | O3 | | 2 | Charleston no page yet | 30 Good | 0.6 | O3 | ## What is the UV index in West Virginia today? The strongest UV in West Virginia today is 6.7 (High) in Huntington, arriving around 1pm local time. The mildest of the 2 metros we model here peaks at 6.6 in Charleston. UV is modelled, not measured — unlike the AQI above it, which comes off an instrument. How we handle UV → ## Fourteen monitors along the valley floors Terrain decided where West Virginians live, and it decided where the emissions are too. Towns follow the river bottoms because the ridges leave no room, and industry followed the same water: chemical plants along the Kanawha, through what is still called the Chemical Valley, and coal-fired generation strung along the Ohio. On cold, still days a valley a mile or two across holds its own air, with no coastline and no open plain to flush it. Whatever shares the valley is what accumulates. The Division of Air Quality inside the Department of Environmental Protection operates fourteen monitoring sites statewide — two each in Kanawha and Brooke counties, one each in Berkeley, Cabell, Greenbrier, Hancock, Harrison, Marion, Monongalia, Ohio and Wood — including an NCore site in Charleston. That leaves most of the fifty-five counties without one, and it leaves Institute and Belle, two Kanawha Valley plant towns, with no regulatory monitor at all. Community groups have covered part of that gap themselves: a Kanawha Valley project put up twelve PurpleAir sensors, with units in Belle, Nitro, St. Albans and Charleston’s West Side. Coverage here is thin, and the reason is arithmetic rather than judgment: the state has few metros large enough to carry their own page. A missing city page is not a finding that the air there was checked and came back fine. In a state shaped like this one, it usually means the closest reading came from a monitor on the far side of a ridge. ## Where do these West Virginia readings come from? 2 of the 2 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Charleston, Huntington. The dominant pollutant across West Virginia today is O3 . We track 2 metropolitan areas in West Virginia, 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 West Virginia looks wrong the answer is often next door. ## Related Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC