Air Quality in Augusta, Georgia — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Augusta — with free alerts the moment the air changes enough to matter.

Live Augusta AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Augusta and North Augusta, SC, Evans, Martinez, Grovetown.

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.

Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.

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?

This page shows the current AQI for Augusta, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood.

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 AQI level is unhealthy?

Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0-50 is Good and 51-100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups - kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions - and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.

Where does Canairy's Augusta data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Augusta and nearby communities like Evans and North Augusta, cross-referenced with government monitors and the Google Air Quality API. You can see every sensor behind your numbers on the live map - there's no black box.

Is Canairy free?

Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.