Air Quality in Miami, Florida — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Miami — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 14 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Miami, Florida is AQI 14 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.5 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 5 to 24. Canairy's verdict: Breathe easy.
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 Miami: 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 Miami and Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Hialeah, North Miami. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Miami
The sensors Canairy reads in Miami agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 19-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.0 mi NW | 24 | Good |
| 2.9 mi ESE | 14 | Good |
| 3.6 mi NNW | 13 | Good |
| 7.9 mi WSW | 5 | Good |
Miami's air is good most of the year, and that is a real answer rather than a polite one. The EPA's Green Book lists no county in Florida as nonattainment for any federal air pollutant, and Miami-Dade is not an exception hiding inside that. What interrupts the good stretch is fire to the west and dust from the east. In June 2026 a lightning strike near the Metro West Detention Center started the Quarry 2 Fire, which grew to nearly 16,000 acres while the Coptic Fire took another 1,680 nearby; Krome Avenue closed westbound near Northwest 177th Avenue and U.S. 27, roughly 200 people were moved out of trailers in west Miami-Dade, and one resident described visibility down to about 100 feet. Then every summer the Sahara arrives, and the sky goes milky for days at a time.
What Canairy does for Miami
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Miami: open the windows, or keep them shut.
Smoke alerts
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.
Every place you care about
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The fires are west of you, and the wind decides whether you notice
South Florida's dry stretch runs roughly November through April, and that is when the Everglades and the farmland along Krome Avenue are most ready to burn. But the June 2026 cluster shows it is not only a dry-season problem: four fires burned at once at the start of the wet season, ignited by lightning rather than by people. Quarry 2 reached nearly 16,000 acres, the Well Fire about 500, the Coptic Fire about 1,680, and a smaller 51-acre fire burned inside Everglades National Park. Roads closed in both Miami-Dade and Broward. Because the burning ground sits west of the built-up coast, whether any of it reaches your street is a question about that day's wind, not about the size of the fire. That is the gap a sensor a few miles from your house closes and a citywide average does not.
One thing worth ruling out: the cane smoke you may have read about is not Miami's. Around 400,000 acres of sugarcane in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee are burned from fall through spring, and the towns that live with that smoke are Belle Glade, Pahokee, South Bay, Canal Point and Moore Haven, well inland and well north of Biscayne Bay. State restrictions dating to 1991 block those burns when the wind would push smoke east toward the Palm Beach suburbs, which is one of the reasons the practice is contested where it happens and largely invisible here.
The Sahara sends dust across the Atlantic every summer
The Saharan Air Layer is a mass of very dry, dusty air that forms over the Sahara in late spring, summer and early fall. NOAA's hurricane research division describes outbreaks ramping up in mid-June, peaking from late June to mid-August, then subsiding quickly after mid-August, with a fresh plume leaving Africa every three to five days at the height of the season. Each one is a layer roughly two to two and a half miles thick sitting about a mile above the surface, and it can reach as far west as Florida, Central America and Texas. It also suppresses clouds and thunderstorms, which is why some of the hottest, stillest days of a Miami summer are dusty ones. Joseph Prospero, professor emeritus at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School, has said plainly that every year there is dust that comes into the area.
The June 2020 outbreak, nicknamed the Godzilla plume, is the one worth knowing about. Satellite records showed it as the most intense episode in two decades, and on 27 June about 40 percent of EPA monitoring stations across nine southern states exceeded the daily PM2.5 standard of 35 micrograms per cubic metre; the highest reading in the country that day was 73.9 at St. Marks, Florida. NASA reported PM2.5 reaching unhealthy levels, AQI 151 to 200, in Florida, Texas and Georgia. South Florida, oddly, got less of it than the Panhandle did, because a strong high near the Bahamas pushed the core of the plume south of the peninsula and into the southern Gulf first. That is the pattern to remember here: a big dust event in the news does not automatically mean dusty air over Miami, and the only way to know is to look at what the sensors are reading.
Miami's air record has actually improved
Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties were all once designated nonattainment for the old one-hour ozone standard set in 1979, and all were redesignated to maintenance as the region came back into compliance. That standard has since been revoked and replaced by tighter eight-hour limits, and South Florida meets those too. Ozone and PM2.5 are the two pollutants that most commonly drive the AQI in Florida, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection, whose network is run jointly with nine local government air programmes.
None of that means every hour is clean everywhere. A fixed regulatory monitor is designed to characterise a region, not a block, and Miami is a city where the air a mile inland on a light westerly is genuinely different from the air on the bay. The sensible use of a page like this one is not to check whether Miami as a whole is in trouble, but to watch the few places you actually spend time.
Miami air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Miami right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Miami, Florida is AQI 14 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.5 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Miami today?
In Miami the first question is whether it is smoke or dust. Smoke usually comes from the west, from the Everglades and the agricultural land along Krome Avenue, and it has a direction and a smell; in June 2026 four fires burned there at once, the largest reaching nearly 16,000 acres after a lightning strike, and Krome Avenue closed. Saharan dust behaves differently. It hazes the entire sky rather than arriving from one side, it turns the sun orange, and it shows up between mid-June and mid-August when the Saharan Air Layer is active. If the whole horizon is milky and there is no smell, it is far more likely the desert than a fire.
Does Saharan dust actually affect breathing?
It can. Naresh Kumar of the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine has warned that people with asthma and COPD face an increased risk of flare-ups during dust events, and that the dust carries bacteria which can raise the risk of allergic reactions and infections. The particles are fine enough to register on a PM2.5 sensor, which is why a dusty week shows up on this page as a rise in the reading rather than as anything exotic. If you are in a sensitive group, treating a heavy dust day like a moderate smoke day is a reasonable default.
Is the haze from sugarcane burning south of Lake Okeechobee?
Almost certainly not, in Miami. The roughly 400,000 acres of sugarcane in the Everglades Agricultural Area are burned from fall to spring, and the smoke settles on the Glades towns of Belle Glade, Pahokee, South Bay, Canal Point and Moore Haven. That is a long way inland and well north of Miami, and since 1991 the state has restricted those burns when the wind would carry smoke east toward the Palm Beach suburbs. It is a real and heavily argued issue where it happens; it is not the source of a hazy afternoon in Coral Gables.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Miami, 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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