Air Quality in Akron, Ohio — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Akron — with free alerts the moment smoke drifts in.
AQI 40 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Akron, Ohio is AQI 40 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 7.2 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 37 to 43. 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 Akron: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a very 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 Akron and Cuyahoga Falls, Barberton, Stow, Tallmadge. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Akron
The sensors Canairy reads in Akron agree right now — all 2 sit in the Good band, a 6-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.5 mi SW | 43 | Good |
| 2.6 mi ESE | 37 | Good |
Akron built its name on rubber, and for most of the twentieth century that meant tire plants and the haze that came with them. Almost all of that manufacturing has gone; Goodyear is the last major tire company still headquartered here. Today the air a resident actually breathes is shaped less by a single smokestack and more by summer ground-level ozone, fine particles carried in on regional wind, everyday highway traffic, and the occasional summer of wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada.
What Canairy does for Akron
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Akron: 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
Home, work, the kids' school — across Akron or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Akron is doing next
| When | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|
| Today | Good | ozone |
| Tomorrow | Good | ozone |
| Monday | Good | ozone |
| Tuesday | Good | ozone |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Canton and Massillon reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
The Rubber City cleared out, but the region's air still moves through Akron
Akron earned the nickname Rubber Capital of the World after BFGoodrich, Goodyear, Firestone and General Tire all set up here between 1869 and 1915. Most of that heavy manufacturing left decades ago. Goodyear is the last major tire company still based in the city and opened a new global headquarters in 2013, and Bridgestone runs a technical center here, but the sprawling plants that once defined the skyline are largely history.
That matters for how you read the air. The old picture of one factory fouling a neighborhood no longer fits Akron. Instead, northeast Ohio sits in a wider industrial and traffic corridor, and a lot of what a local sensor picks up on a bad day is fine particle pollution and ozone ingredients that blew in from elsewhere in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region rather than something made on the next block.
Canadian wildfire smoke reached the Great Lakes in 2023
Wildfire smoke used to feel like someone else's problem in Ohio. The summer of 2023 changed that. Smoke from Canadian wildfires spread across the Great Lakes and the eastern US, triggering air quality alerts for roughly 80 million people, pushing Chicago to the worst air quality in the world at an AQI of 228 on June 27, and prompting alerts in both Michigan and Pennsylvania, the states that flank Ohio.
Northeast Ohio sits right in that path, and the same milky, sun-dimming haze settled over the region on the worst days. The lesson for Akron is that dangerous smoke can now arrive on a summer wind from hundreds of miles away, with no local fire anywhere in sight. That is exactly the kind of change that is easy to miss by eye and worth catching from a sensor reading before you send kids out to play.
A river valley below the lake, with ozone that builds in summer heat
Akron sits on the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau at about 945 feet, along the Little Cuyahoga River and roughly 40 miles south of Cleveland and Lake Erie. Just north, the Cuyahoga River carves a deep glacial valley through Cuyahoga Valley National Park between Akron and Cleveland. Rolling terrain and river valleys like these can let air pool and pollutants linger on calm days, especially compared with a flat, breezy site.
The everyday pattern here is a summer one. On hot, sunny, still days, traffic and industrial emissions cook into ground-level ozone, and fine particle levels can climb with regional transport. Akron is far enough inland that it misses the heaviest lake-effect weather, but it does not miss the region's summer ozone season, which is when a lot of the year's worst air quality readings show up.
Akron air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Akron right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 1:39 PM EDT, the air quality in Akron, Ohio is AQI 40 — Good — with PM2.5 at 7.2 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Does wildfire smoke affect Akron?
It can. In the summer of 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires spread across the Great Lakes and eastern US, triggering air quality alerts for about 80 million people and prompting alerts in neighboring Michigan and Pennsylvania. Northeast Ohio sits in that path, so smoke can arrive on a summer wind with no fire anywhere nearby, which is why watching a live sensor reading is more reliable than judging the haze by eye.
Is Akron's old rubber industry still the main thing polluting the air?
Mostly not anymore. Almost all of Akron's tire manufacturing left decades ago, with Goodyear the last major tire company still based here. Today the everyday drivers of local air quality are more likely to be summer ground-level ozone, fine particles carried in on regional wind from the wider Ohio Valley and Great Lakes area, and traffic, rather than a single factory.
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 2 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Akron, 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 Akron
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