Air Quality in Orlando, Florida — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Orlando — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 26 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Orlando, Florida is AQI 26 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 4.6 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 25 to 46. 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 Orlando: 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 Orlando and Winter Park, Maitland, Altamonte Springs, Apopka. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Orlando
The sensors Canairy reads in Orlando agree right now — all 3 sit in the Good band, a 21-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 8.1 mi WSW | 25 | Good |
| 8.2 mi NNW | 26 | Good |
| 18.6 mi WSW | 46 | Good |
Orlando is the rare large American city with no coast and no heavy industry shaping its air, and it shows: MetroPlan Orlando's own summary is that Central Florida has enjoyed air quality within federal standards, and no Florida county currently appears in the EPA's nonattainment list. The thing that actually changes the air here is fire. Florida runs one of the busiest prescribed burning programmes in the country — roughly 88,000 authorisations a year covering more than 2.1 million acres — and Orlando sits in the middle of the pine flatwoods and ranchland where much of that burning happens. When a burn and a still, damp night line up badly, the results have been lethal: on 9 January 2008, smoke from a prescribed burn that escaped containment about two kilometres away mixed with fog on Interstate 4 near mile marker 55 in Polk County and dropped visibility to zero. Seventy vehicles collided. Five people died and 38 were injured.
What Canairy does for Orlando
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Orlando: 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.
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Prescribed fire is the biggest thing in Central Florida's air
Prescribed burning is not a nuisance the state tolerates, it is deliberate policy. Florida's ecosystems evolved with frequent fire, and the Florida Forest Service issues around 88,000 burn authorisations in an average year to landowners and agencies covering more than 2.1 million acres, under Chapter 590 of the Florida Statutes and Chapter 5I-2 of the Administrative Code. The alternative is worse fires later. But the smoke is real while it is happening, and Central Florida's inland geography works against you: cool, still nights let smoke sink and pool in low ground instead of lifting away.
That is exactly what happened on I-4. A burn lit the day before got away when relative humidity dropped below what had been forecast, and overnight the smoke settled into the fog already forming along the corridor. The Polk County sheriff described it as a wall of smoke and fog. If you drive I-4, the Turnpike or SR 528 early on a cold, windless winter morning after a burn day, that combination is the specific local hazard worth respecting, and it is also the pattern that produces the worst overnight PM2.5 readings in Orlando's suburbs.
The summer Central Florida burned
The reference point everyone here over a certain age has is 1998. Between May and July that year, wildfires burned roughly 500,000 acres across Florida, with Brevard, Osceola, Orange, Seminole, St. Johns, Flagler and Volusia counties among the hardest hit. Around 10,000 firefighters were involved, more than 150 structures were destroyed, and by 4 July, 135 miles of Interstate 95 from Jacksonville to Titusville were closed. The entire population of Flagler County, about 35,000 people, was ordered to evacuate on the forecast that separate fires would merge into a single front running from Daytona to St. Augustine.
Nothing since has come close, and the prescribed burning programme is part of the reason. But it establishes what Central Florida's air is capable of when a drought lines up with the spring fire season, and it is why a smoke plume that started fifty miles away in Osceola or Volusia county is a normal thing to notice in Orlando rather than an alarming one.
Ozone, traffic, and the number that decides attainment
With no refineries and no port, Central Florida's routine pollution is mostly tailpipes. MetroPlan Orlando puts emissions from cars, trucks and boats at more than 60 percent of the region's air pollution. Ozone is the pollutant that matters most for compliance, and the way it is judged is not by the worst day. The region takes the fourth-highest eight-hour ozone reading of the year, averages it with the fourth-highest of the two previous years, and that rolling three-year figure has to stay below 70 parts per billion. Central Florida has stayed under it, which is why the region can continue its planning practices as they are rather than being forced into a federal air quality plan.
Four monitoring sites cover the region — in Winter Park, Orlando, Four Corners and Sanford — with the Winter Park site also tracking PM2.5 and nitrogen dioxide. Statewide, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection says ozone and PM2.5 are the two pollutants that most commonly drive the AQI. Four regulatory monitors across a metro this spread out is a coarse net, though, which is the case for watching neighbourhood sensors alongside them.
Orlando air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Orlando right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Orlando, Florida is AQI 26 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.6 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Orlando today?
In Central Florida the answer is usually a prescribed burn. The Florida Forest Service authorises about 88,000 of them a year statewide, covering more than 2.1 million acres, and a great deal of that ground is the pine flatwoods and ranchland ringing Orlando. That smoke has a direction and clears within a day or so. The other possibility in summer is Saharan dust, which is not smoke at all: it hazes the entire sky evenly, has no smell, and shows up between mid-June and mid-August when plumes cross the Atlantic every three to five days. If it is winter, calm and foggy at dawn, assume burn smoke and drive accordingly.
How can I tell a prescribed burn from a wildfire?
Prescribed burns are planned and authorised, so they generally start in the morning, produce a plume from a fixed location, and are done by evening. They are also usually announced locally. A wildfire behaves differently — it moves, it grows through the afternoon, and it tends to come with road closures and news coverage. Practically speaking your response is the same either way: if PM2.5 near you is climbing, close the windows and keep the exercise indoors. The distinction matters mostly for how long you should expect it to last.
Is Orlando's air within federal standards?
Yes. No Florida county currently appears in the EPA's nonattainment list for any criteria pollutant, and MetroPlan Orlando's position is that Central Florida has enjoyed air quality within federal standards. Ozone compliance is measured as a three-year rolling average of the fourth-highest annual reading, which must stay below 70 parts per billion, and the region has stayed under it. That is a regional average over a year, though, not a promise about the air on your street during a burn — which is what this page is for.
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 Orlando, 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 Orlando
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