Air Quality in Jacksonville, Florida — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Jacksonville — with free alerts when summer ozone climbs.
AQI 58 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Jacksonville, Florida is AQI 58 — Moderate and rising — with PM2.5 at 13.2 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 40 to 59. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is below the World Health Organization's 24-hour guideline of 15 µg/m³. The WHO figure is a daily average and this is a live reading, so read it as a sense of magnitude rather than a formal exceedance — a brief spike and a bad day are not the same thing. More on the WHO guidelines
Pollen today in Jacksonville: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a low level, from Google's pollen forecast. Canairy shows the tree, grass and weed forecast beside the air reading on every plan, including the free one.
Free to download · Live data from PurpleAir & public monitors
Live PurpleAir sensor map for Jacksonville and Orange Park, Atlantic Beach, Jacksonville Beach, Fleming Island. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Jacksonville
The sensors Canairy reads in Jacksonville are 19 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.5 mi E | 40 | Good |
| 3.6 mi WSW | 59 | Moderate |
| 4.2 mi WSW | 58 | Moderate |
For most of the last two decades, Jacksonville's air has actually been good. The American Lung Association gives Duval County a B grade for both ozone and short-term particle pollution, and on an average day the AQI here sits in the clean 30s and 40s. The exception is the stretch of hot, humid afternoons from roughly May through September, when the same heat and sun that make the St. Johns River so pleasant also cook vehicle and power-plant exhaust into ground-level ozone — Jacksonville logs around 196 days a year above 80°F, more than enough warm sunshine to matter.
What Canairy does for Jacksonville
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Jacksonville: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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A push or text the moment the air crosses your threshold — and again when it clears.
A heads-up before it's bad
Trend alerts catch the air turning, so you can close up the house before the smoke settles in.
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Jacksonville used to smell like money
From 1938 into the late 1990s, two paper mills operated on Talleyrand Avenue along the St. Johns River, alongside chemical and turpentine plants that processed the mills' byproducts. On a windy day the sulfurous stench could blanket the entire city, and it became such a fixture of local life that Mayor Hans Tanzler, who ran the city from 1967 to 1979, defended the industry by calling it simply "the smell of money."
That changed after WJXT's 1985 documentary "The Smell of Money" estimated the mills were releasing roughly 100,000 tons of pollution a year, which helped elect Tommy Hazouri mayor in 1987 on a "Stop the Stench" platform. Hazouri demoted the city's pollution-control chief, added eight enforcement staff, and pushed fines against holdout polluters through the courts. Combined with tightening regulation, both major mills had shut down by the late 1990s, and the odor that once defined Jacksonville's national reputation faded within a decade.
The stench is gone, but the Northside plant is still running
The JEA Northside Generating Station sits on the St. Johns River near Interstate 295 and State Road 105 — much the same Northside industrial stretch where the old paper mills once stood. Built starting in 1966 and upgraded in 2002, it still burns coal and petroleum coke across two 297.5-megawatt units alongside a third unit that runs on fuel oil or natural gas, for combined capacity above 1,300 megawatts.
Unlike the old mill stench, the plant's output is largely invisible: filings tracked by the Sierra Club put its nitrogen oxide emissions at roughly 910 tons a year. NOx doesn't smell like anything, but it reacts with summer sun to form ground-level ozone, which is exactly the pollutant that actually drives Jacksonville's worst air-quality days now. In 2022, the Sierra Club publicly pushed JEA for a firm coal-retirement date, arguing the aging units would need hundreds of millions of dollars in new pollution controls to keep running legally.
Summer heat, not smoke, is the season to watch here
Jacksonville doesn't have the wildfire seasons that define air quality out West — this is a real ozone story instead. Duval County was formally designated EPA ozone nonattainment from 1992 to 1994 before being upgraded to maintenance status in 1995, and while cleaner vehicles and tighter rules have kept it there since, the underlying ingredients — heat, sun, and tailpipe and power-plant exhaust — haven't gone anywhere.
Jacksonville's afternoon thunderstorms, which roll through most summer days from roughly May to September, cut both ways: the rain scrubs particles out of the air, but the heat and humidity that build up beforehand are exactly the conditions ozone favors. That's why the worst ozone hours tend to land in the sunny early-to-mid afternoon, before the day's storm breaks — worth knowing before you send kids out to play or head out for an afternoon run in July.
Jacksonville air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Jacksonville right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:03 AM EDT, the air quality in Jacksonville, Florida is AQI 58 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 13.2 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why did Jacksonville used to smell so bad?
From 1938 into the late 1990s, two paper mills on Talleyrand Avenue, along with nearby chemical and turpentine plants, released a sulfurous odor that could blanket the whole city on a windy day. A 1985 WJXT documentary, "The Smell of Money," helped elect Mayor Tommy Hazouri in 1987 on a "Stop the Stench" platform of aggressive enforcement, and both mills had closed by the late 1990s.
Does Jacksonville still have industrial air pollution?
Some. The JEA Northside Generating Station, on the same Northside stretch of the St. Johns River where the old paper mills once stood, still burns coal and petroleum coke and emits an estimated 910 tons of nitrogen oxides a year. That NOx doesn't smell like the old mill stench, but it's a key ingredient in the ground-level ozone that now drives Jacksonville's worst summer air days.
What the AQI numbers mean
| AQI | Category | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| 0–50 | Good | Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity. |
| 51–100 | Moderate | Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside. |
| 101–150 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | Kids, elderly, and respiratory conditions stay closer to home. |
| 151–200 | Unhealthy | Skip outdoor exercise. Close windows. |
| 201–300 | Very Unhealthy | Limit time outside. N95 if you must go. |
| 301+ | Hazardous | Health emergency. Stay inside, run filtration if you have it. |
Canairy lets you tighten these bands if you’re more sensitive than the EPA default, so an alert can fire before the official category changes. How to read the Air Quality Index
Where these readings come from
The AQI at the top of this page is the median of the 3 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Jacksonville, with outliers set aside so that one sensor brought indoors — or parked beside a barbecue — cannot set the number for a whole city. Every sensor behind it is listed above with its distance and bearing from the city center. There is no black box here.
In the app, a place you save resolves the same way first. When no neighborhood sensor is reporting it falls back to the nearest EPA AirNow monitor, and anything modeled rather than measured is labelled a regional estimate rather than passed off as a sensor reading. How low-cost sensors compare to regulatory monitors
About Canairy
Canairy is free to download. The free plan covers one saved place with live readings, a plain-English verdict, and push alerts when the air crosses a threshold you choose. Paid plans add more places, faster refreshes, and SMS alerts. It is built by two parents in Sonoma County, California, who got tired of guessing whether it was safe to send the kids outside. Why we built it
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Air quality near Jacksonville
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