Air Quality in Birmingham, Alabama — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Birmingham — with free alerts when summer ozone climbs into unhealthy territory.
AQI 83 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Birmingham, Alabama is AQI 83 — Moderate and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 26.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 73 to 93. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.7 times 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 Birmingham: 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 Birmingham and Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Homewood, Trussville. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Birmingham
The sensors Canairy reads in Birmingham agree right now — all 4 sit in the Moderate band, a 20-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.4 mi SE | 93 | Moderate |
| 2.6 mi E | 73 | Moderate |
| 6.4 mi NNE | 86 | Moderate |
| 7.3 mi WSW | 80 | Moderate |
Birmingham's air-quality problem isn't wildfire smoke — it's the same summer heat and industrial legacy that built this city in the first place. The American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report gave the Birmingham-Cullman-Talladega metro an F for ozone, ranking it 4th-worst in the Southeast and 46th out of 226 metro areas nationwide, with unhealthy ozone days climbing to six a year after averaging close to one just a few years back. Most days, especially outside the hottest months, the air here is unremarkable. It's the long, humid stretch from May through September — when heat and sunlight cook vehicle exhaust into ozone inside a valley that doesn't clear out easily — that the numbers turn bad.
What Canairy does for Birmingham
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Birmingham: 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 Birmingham or across the country, on one screen.
Jones Valley has been trapping this city's air for over a century
Birmingham sits in Jones Valley at about 600 feet, hemmed in by Red Mountain just south of downtown and by parallel Appalachian foothill ridges running northeast to southwest. On hot, still days that terrain limits how much the air over the metro actually mixes and clears, which is exactly what turned deadly in November 1971: a thermal inversion settled over the valley from November 15 through 21 while steel plants ran at full capacity in 80-degree heat, and smog got bad enough that Federal Judge Sam Pointer signed a temporary restraining order on November 19 forcing 23 major industries to cut emissions — one of the first actions of its kind in the country. Truckers had already taken to calling the city 'Smoke City,' and UAB pulmonologist Dr. Ben Branscomb later found that 27% of patients at the Birmingham VA hospital had emphysema.
The visible soot from that era is mostly gone — steel production here is a fraction of what it was — but the same valley geography still holds today's pollution close to the ground. What collects now is largely invisible: ground-level ozone and fine particles from vehicle exhaust and regional industry, not smokestack smoke you can see from downtown.
North Birmingham is still cleaning up a century of industrial pollution
The EPA's 35th Avenue Superfund site covers the North Birmingham neighborhoods of Collegeville, Harriman Park, and Fairmont, which sit next to coke plants including ABC Coke (owned by Drummond Company) and the plant long known as Walter Coke, now ERP Coke. Soil testing that began in 2012 found unhealthy levels of arsenic, lead, and benzo[a]pyrene, a hydrocarbon produced by coking coal, and the EPA has since tested more than 1,200 properties and replaced contaminated soil at many of them. These same neighborhoods were restricted to Black residents under Birmingham's 1926 racial zoning ordinance, and research on that era found such zones were roughly four times more likely than white neighborhoods to sit next to heavy industry.
The soil cleanup hasn't ended the story: as recently as early 2026, residents and environmental groups including GASP were pressing state regulators to tighten ABC Coke's air permit rather than renew it as written. For anyone living near 35th Avenue North, air quality here is less a seasonal event and more a decades-long point-source problem sitting right next to specific streets and homes.
Ozone season runs May through September, and it's getting worse
Ground-level ozone forms when nitrogen oxides — mostly from vehicle exhaust — react with sunlight and heat, so Birmingham's unhealthy ozone days cluster on hot, sunny afternoons between roughly 2 and 7 p.m. from late spring through early fall. Jefferson and Shelby counties spent decades classified by the EPA as a nonattainment area for ozone before finally cleaning up enough to be released from that status, but the American Lung Association's tracking shows the trend reversing: from an average of roughly one unhealthy ozone day in earlier reports, up to five in the 2021-2023 data and six in the most recent 2022-2024 report, with vehicle traffic named as a leading contributor alongside regional industrial sources.
A single number for the whole metro also hides a lot of local variation. North Birmingham, sitting closest to the coke plants, and neighborhoods south of Red Mountain in Vestavia Hills or Hoover can see meaningfully different readings on the same afternoon. That's why Canairy reads the network of PurpleAir sensors spread across Birmingham and its suburbs instead of a single downtown monitor — the number you see comes from sensors near the places you actually saved.
Birmingham air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Birmingham right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 9:15 AM EDT, the air quality in Birmingham, Alabama is AQI 83 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 26.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Birmingham get bad ozone in the summer?
Ground-level ozone forms when vehicle exhaust reacts with sunlight and heat, and Birmingham's Jones Valley location holds that mix in place on hot, still afternoons from roughly May through September. The American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report gave the metro an F for ozone, with unhealthy days climbing to six a year and vehicle traffic named as a leading cause.
What is the 35th Avenue Superfund site in North Birmingham?
It's an EPA-designated cleanup area covering the Collegeville, Harriman Park, and Fairmont neighborhoods near coke plants including ABC Coke and the former Walter Coke facility. Soil testing beginning in 2012 found arsenic, lead, and other industrial contaminants, and the EPA has since tested and remediated soil at more than 1,200 properties, though air-permit disputes over the coke plants continue.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Birmingham, 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 Birmingham
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