Air Quality in Augusta, Georgia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Augusta — with free alerts the moment the air changes enough to matter.
AQI 42 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Augusta, Georgia is AQI 42 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 7.5 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. 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 Augusta: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a high 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 Augusta and North Augusta, SC, Evans, Martinez, Grovetown. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Augusta's air is genuinely good most of the year. Richmond County isn't on the EPA's nonattainment list for ozone or particle pollution — a status a lot of Georgia's bigger, smoggier metros can't claim — and the city sits on the Savannah River's fall line, not boxed into a mountain-ringed valley the way many Western towns are. What breaks that pattern is rare enough to make local news when it happens: in June 2023, smoke from Canada's record wildfire season drifted more than a thousand miles south and pushed Augusta's air into Moderate territory, an event unusual enough that Georgia's environmental regulators had to file federal paperwork explaining the readings.
What Canairy does for Augusta
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Augusta: 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 Augusta or across the country, on one screen.
Augusta meets every federal air-quality standard — most years
Richmond County doesn't appear on the EPA's Green Book list of Georgia counties designated nonattainment for ozone or fine-particle pollution, a status the state's bigger metro areas — Atlanta chief among them — have carried for decades. Augusta also sits at just 148 feet of elevation on the fall line, the geologic boundary where the Piedmont's harder rock gives way to the coastal plain along the Savannah River. There's no mountain ridge here to box in a layer of bad air the way there is in a lot of Western valley towns; a passing front or the river breeze usually clears the area out within a day or two.
That said, summers are hot and humid enough to worry about — Augusta averages roughly 82 days a year at or above 90°F — the same conditions that cook up ozone in other cities. Georgia's own Smog Alert forecasting program covers Atlanta, Macon, and Columbus, but doesn't run a forecast for Augusta at all, which is itself a sign of how rarely local ozone climbs into alert territory rather than proof that summer air here needs no watching.
Canadian wildfire smoke found Augusta in June 2023
Augusta has never really had a wildfire-smoke problem of its own, but on June 7, 2023, the Augusta Chronicle reported that smoke from Canada's historic wildfire season had reached the city, pushing local air into the Moderate range even as it stayed far better than the hazardous readings shutting down parts of the Northeast that same week. It was enough of a real event that Georgia's Environmental Protection Division later filed an Exceptional Event Demonstration with the EPA — a formal request to exclude Augusta's monitoring data from compliance calculations because the exceedance came from smoke blown in from another country, not a local source.
That's the pattern Canairy exists to catch: a genuinely clean-air city can still have a bad-air day, and it can arrive from a fire a thousand miles away with almost no local warning. Augusta doesn't need its own fire season for smoke to matter here — 2023 showed that it just needs the wind to carry it far enough south.
The riverside paper mill has a smell of its own
Downtown Augusta sits close to a large paperboard mill on the Savannah River — built under International Paper, run for years by Graphic Packaging, and sold again to Clearwater Paper in 2024 — that makes solid bleached sulfate (SBS) paperboard for folding cartons and cups. The sulfate, or kraft, pulping process used to break down wood releases sulfur compounds with a distinctive rotten-egg smell, and mills like this one are the reason "what's that smell" is a familiar Augusta question on days when the wind is blowing the wrong way.
That odor is a real nuisance but not the same thing as a bad AQI reading — the human nose picks up sulfur compounds at concentrations far below anything that shows up as a health concern on a particle or ozone monitor, so a smelly day and an unhealthy-AQI day in Augusta are usually two different things. The city's industrial history runs deeper than the mill smell, too: Hyde Park, a historically Black neighborhood developed in the 1940s, sat near a wood-treatment plant, an industrial ceramics factory, and a Georgia Power plant, and a 1993 EPA study found arsenic, chromium, dioxins, PCBs, and lead in the area's soil, groundwater, and air. It's a reminder that 'the air is fine today' and 'there was never an industrial pollution problem here' aren't the same claim.
Augusta air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Augusta right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 6:40 PM EDT, the air quality in Augusta, Georgia is AQI 42 — Good — with PM2.5 at 7.5 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did wildfire smoke reach Augusta in 2023?
In June 2023, smoke from Canada's record wildfire season drifted more than a thousand miles south and pushed Augusta's AQI into Moderate territory. It was unusual enough that Georgia's environmental regulators filed a federal Exceptional Event Demonstration attributing the readings to the smoke rather than local sources - a reminder that a fire doesn't have to be nearby to affect the air here.
What's that smell near the river some days?
Augusta's riverside paperboard mill - run by Clearwater Paper since 2024, and by Graphic Packaging and International Paper before that - uses the sulfate (kraft) pulping process, which releases sulfur compounds with a distinctive rotten-egg smell on certain wind directions. It's a real nuisance odor, but it's a different thing from an unhealthy AQI reading; Canairy's numbers reflect measured particles and ozone, not smell.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Augusta, 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 Augusta
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