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Air Quality Alerts
Air Quality Alerts
Our meteorologists call Air Quality Alert Days to protect you. These days are important for everyone, but especially for people with breathing problems like asthma as well as the elderly or young children.
A complete list of health recommendations from the Department of Health and Human services.
Check the Air Quality Index daily on your weather app by visiting EGLE’s MiAir or the AirNow.gov web sites. During Air Quality Alerts, ozone or fine particulate levels may be harmful for your health.
Types of Air Quality Alerts
Fine Particulate (PM2.5)
Harmful levels of fine particulates (really tiny dust) can happen any time during the year. In the warmer drier months, especially in the summer, smoke from wildfires may cause high levels of PM2.5. During winter months when we get really strong ground-level weather inversions (when pollutants have nowhere to go and stay trapped at the ground level). Both of these may cause levels of pollutants to be high enough to cause an Air Quality Alert to be called.
An alert is issued when levels of PM2.5 are expected to be “unhealthy for sensitive groups (USG)”, “unhealthy”, “very unhealthy” or “hazardous”.
Ozone:
You may be thinking about the ozone layer - the natural invisible shield that helps protect us from the sun's harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays - we're not talking about that ozone. We're talking about harmful ground-level ozone.
Where does this harmful ground-level ozone come from?
Higher levels of ground-level ozone when the sun, weather, and certain pollutants all mix together just right. That usually happens around summertime (May - September), but that isn't the only time that we call Air Quality Alerts
Stay informed
These resources provide current air quality conditions and AQI ratings for cities and communities throughout the state.
Take action during Air Quality Alerts in 60 seconds
Take 60 seconds to learn about Air Quality Alerts, including what causes them and what you can should avoid doing during the hottest parts of the day.
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A street-level view of the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing with smoky air and a warm orange hue from wildfire smoke
Part of our learn about air quality series
Learn more about air qualityAir quality affects the environment and your overall health in countless ways.
Find information about quality issues in Michigan, including air quality related actions open for input from the public.
The relationship between Air Quality Action Days, Ozone Action Days, and Clean Air Action Days
You may be more familiar with Ozone Action Days, which is an older term for Air Quality Action Days. This name was updated to include other fine particulate matter pollution (such as wildfire smoke) as well as ozone. For a period, Air Quality Action Days were also called Clean Air Action Days, though that term has also been retired.
