Today was a pretty bad air day in New York City, with an air quality rating of 93 on airnow.gov, even at 10:00 PM when I went outside to take photos. That's about three times worse than the typical air quality I get here (which is an average of about 33). Despite taking many flash pictures outdoors tonight, I did not get more orbs in my photos than I normally get (and I got vastly fewer orbs than quite a few days when the air quality was far better, with a rating of about 25, when I photographed dense orb swarms shown here).
That's to be expected, because with the very rare exception of heavy dust that you can smell or notice with your eyes, there is no relation between dust levels and the number of orbs you get in pictures. Even in places such as Beijing, China or Shanghai, where the air is often 10 times worse than in New York, orbs will not commonly appear in outdoor photos. You can substantiate that claim by doing a Google image search for "Shanghai orbs" or "Beijing orbs," which will show very few or no orbs in front of buildings in Shanghai or Beijing.
The reason why this is so is well explained here. Typical outdoor air particles are only about 1 micron in size, but you need particles hundreds of microns in size for decent-sized dust orbs to appear in your photos. So even when the air get 10 times worse than typical outdoor air (as it often does in Chinese cities), the airborne dust particles are still about 10 times too small to produce dust orbs in your photos. Long story short: the idea that orbs are mainly dust is bunk.
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