Air Quality in Atlanta, Georgia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Atlanta — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 54 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Atlanta, Georgia is AQI 54 — Moderate and rising — with PM2.5 at 10.8 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 46 to 61. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
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 Atlanta: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a moderate 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 Atlanta and Decatur, Marietta, Sandy Springs, Roswell. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Atlanta
The sensors Canairy reads in Atlanta are 15 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.0 mi N | 52 | Moderate |
| 5.0 mi E | 59 | Moderate |
| 7.1 mi SE | 46 | Good |
| 8.3 mi E | 61 | Moderate |
| 9.5 mi N | 54 | Moderate |
Atlanta's air problem is ozone, and it is a summer problem. The seven-county metro area — Bartow, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett and Henry — spent years designated nonattainment for the federal ozone standard and was only redesignated to attainment on 17 October 2022, on the strength of certified monitoring data from 2018 to 2020. Georgia EPD credits cleaner passenger vehicles for most of that: across roughly thirty years the state cut nitrogen oxide emissions 68 percent and volatile organic compounds 57 percent while vehicle miles travelled rose 59 percent. The improvement is real and it is not finished. The worst air day in metro Atlanta in 2025 was 25 June, when the United Avenue monitor in southeast Atlanta reached AQI 129 on ozone, on a hot afternoon.
What Canairy does for Atlanta
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Atlanta: 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 Atlanta or across the country, on one screen.
The worst air comes on the hottest, stillest afternoons
Ozone is not emitted by anything. It is manufactured in the air on hot sunny days out of traffic exhaust and other pollution, which is why Atlanta's bad days cluster in June, July and August and almost never in winter. NASA's Project ATLANTA — the Atlanta Land-use Analysis: Temperature and Air-quality study, begun in 1996 and presented in March 1999 — found the metro running up to 10 degrees hotter than the rural land around it, and made the connection to air quality explicit: with a 10-degree rise in temperature, the rate of the chemical reaction that creates ozone roughly doubles. The same heat island is strong enough to trigger its own thunderstorms south of the city.
The traffic feeding that reaction is not concentrated downtown. Georgia DOT puts average daily traffic on the I-285 Westside Corridor at 194,000 vehicles, with trucks making up 18 percent of it. And the monitors that catch the highest ozone are almost all outside the Perimeter. In 2024, metro Atlanta's five worst days were every one of them ozone days, and they were recorded at Gwinnett Tech in Lawrenceville (AQI 161 on 26 June), McDonough in Henry County (133 on 14 June), Douglasville (133 on 25 June) and South DeKalb (133 on 13 July). Ozone forms downwind while the plume cooks in sunlight, so the highest number of the day is rarely at the busiest interchange.
The tree canopy cuts both ways
Atlanta has the densest urban tree coverage of any major American city, which is where the City in a Forest name comes from. That matters for air quality in a way people do not always connect: NASA's thermal imaging of Atlanta shows heavily vegetated areas as the coolest surfaces in the metro, cooled by evaporation from the leaves, while pavement and rooftops run hottest. Every degree the canopy takes off a July afternoon is a degree not going into making ozone.
The same canopy is also why spring here is what it is. On 29 March 2025 Atlanta Allergy & Asthma logged 14,801 pollen grains per cubic metre of air, the highest count in 35 years, beating the previous record of 9,369 set in 2012. On the same date a year earlier the count had been 1,646. Oak, pine, sycamore, sweetgum and birch did most of it. Worth knowing: pollen is not what an AQI number measures. A PurpleAir sensor reads fine particles, PM2.5, and a record pollen day can pass with the AQI sitting comfortably in the Good range while half the city feels terrible.
The summer the smoke actually got here
Atlanta is a long way from fire country and usually sees wildfire smoke, if at all, as high haze that never reaches the ground. 2023 was the exception. Georgia issued a Code Orange alert for the greater metro area for Friday 9 June 2023 as smoke from Canada filtered south, and the measurable hit came a few weeks later: EPA monitors recorded AQI 124 at South DeKalb on 17 July and 153 — Unhealthy, for everyone — at the McDonough monitor in Henry County on 18 July, both driven by PM2.5 rather than ozone. Georgia Tech researchers tracking the same episode measured fine particulate above 55 micrograms per cubic metre south of Atlanta on 18 and 19 July, from more than 900 fires burning in Canada.
It is worth keeping that in proportion. Across all of 2023 metro Atlanta had 3 Unhealthy days and 18 Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups days, with a peak of AQI 172. In 2025 it had no Unhealthy days at all, 6 Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups days, 150 Good days and a peak of 129. Smoke is the dramatic story; ozone is the one that shows up most years.
Atlanta air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Atlanta right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Atlanta, Georgia is AQI 54 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 10.8 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why is there smoke in Atlanta today?
Most of the time in Atlanta it is not smoke. A hazy, flat white summer sky here is usually humidity plus ozone, and ozone is invisible — you cannot see it, and it will not smell like anything. Real smoke does reach the city occasionally: in mid-July 2023 Canadian wildfire smoke pushed the McDonough monitor to AQI 153, the only Unhealthy day the metro recorded that summer that was not ozone. The way to tell them apart is the pollutant. Smoke moves PM2.5, which is exactly what the sensors on this page read, so if the PM2.5 number is climbing and the air smells like a campfire, it is smoke. If the number is normal and the sky is just milky and still, it is heat and haze.
When is ozone worst in Atlanta?
Late afternoon and early evening, from roughly June through August, on days that are hot, sunny and still. The pattern is consistent in the record: metro Atlanta's worst day in 2023 was 29 June, in 2024 it was 26 June, and in 2025 it was 25 June, and all three were ozone. Cloud, wind or rain usually breaks it. If you run or ride outdoors in summer, mornings are reliably better than evenings here.
Do Atlanta's trees make the air better or worse?
Better for temperature and therefore for ozone — NASA's thermal maps of Atlanta show vegetated land as the coolest surface in the metro, and heat is what drives ozone formation. Harder in spring for anyone with allergies. Atlanta Allergy & Asthma recorded 14,801 pollen grains per cubic metre on 29 March 2025, a 35-year record, mostly oak, pine, sycamore, sweetgum and birch. Pollen does not register on an air quality index, so on a heavy pollen day the AQI on this page can read Good while your eyes disagree.
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 5 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Atlanta, 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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