Air Quality in Clarksville, Tennessee — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Clarksville — with free alerts the moment ozone or smoke crosses your threshold.
AQI 44 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Clarksville, Tennessee is AQI 44 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 7.9 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 Clarksville: 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 Clarksville and Oak Grove, KY, Hopkinsville, KY, Dover, TN, Fort Campbell. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Clarksville doesn't sit in fire country, and for most of the year the air here is genuinely unremarkable in a good way. What Middle Tennessee does get is ground-level ozone: on hot, sunny, windless days from roughly April through September, sunlight cooks vehicle and industrial exhaust into ozone faster than it can clear, and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation has issued Code Orange ozone alerts for the region in multiple recent years. The exception that proved the rule was the summer of 2023, when smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted more than a thousand miles south and triggered a Code Orange alert here too — twice.
What Canairy does for Clarksville
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Clarksville: 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 Clarksville or across the country, on one screen.
Clarksville's real air-quality story is ozone season, not wildfire
Ground-level ozone, not smoke, is the recurring issue here. On hot, sunny, calm days sunlight reacts with vehicle and industrial exhaust to form ozone faster than it disperses, and TDEC has been issuing Code Orange ozone action day alerts for the region for over a decade — one in August 2014 was flagged as the first Air Quality Alert for the area that year, and TDEC issued another Code Orange alert in June 2018 that it extended through midnight that Friday.
Montgomery County has a documented ozone history to go with it: EPA once classified the county, as part of the Clarksville-Hopkinsville, TN-KY area, as nonattainment for the 1997 8-hour ozone standard, before redesignating it to attainment and maintenance on November 21, 2005. The county has stayed in compliance since, but the hot, humid, stagnant summer weather that caused the problem hasn't gone anywhere, which is why TDEC still tracks ozone here every summer and issues an alert whenever forecasts cross the unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups line.
The one time wildfire smoke really did show up: summer 2023
Clarksville got an unusual reminder in 2023 that distance doesn't always protect you. On June 29, TDEC issued a Code Orange health advisory for the Clarksville area alongside a heat warning that pushed the heat index to 113 degrees, cautioning that ground-level particulate concentrations could approach unhealthy levels. Then on July 16, TDEC issued a second Code Orange alert, this one specifically for smoke drifting down from Canadian wildfires, which cut visibility across Middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky to around five miles.
Both alerts landed during the same summer that sent Canadian wildfire smoke over huge stretches of the eastern United States, and Clarksville's brush with it was real, if brief, next to what cities in the Northeast and Midwest saw that year. It's a useful data point rather than a pattern: the city's air isn't normally exposed to wildfire smoke, but a big enough fire season a thousand miles away can still turn a clear Middle Tennessee sky hazy for a day or two.
Flat Highland Rim terrain, but one of the busiest two-lane freeways in the country
Clarksville sits at about 476 feet on the northwestern edge of the Highland Rim, right where the Cumberland River and the Red River converge, and the terrain is mostly rolling rather than a closed valley or basin. That matters for air quality: unlike cities boxed in by mountains, Clarksville doesn't usually get the kind of multi-day temperature inversion that traps smoke or smog in place. Ozone and haze here tend to build and clear with the weather rather than get stuck for a week.
The steadier local pollution source is traffic. Interstate 24 runs along the city's eastern edge on its way to Nashville, and the roughly 35-mile stretch between the two cities carries more than 80,000 vehicles a day in places — one of the highest traffic counts of any two-lane-per-direction interstate segment in the country, and part of a north-south freight corridor that runs all the way from Chicago to Atlanta. That volume of vehicle and truck exhaust concentrated along one corridor is a quieter, more constant contributor to the county's air than any single ozone alert day.
Clarksville air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Clarksville right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 9:54 AM EDT, the air quality in Clarksville, Tennessee is AQI 44 — Good — with PM2.5 at 7.9 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Clarksville get ozone alerts in the summer?
Ozone season in Middle Tennessee runs roughly April through September. On hot, sunny, calm days, sunlight reacts with vehicle and industrial exhaust to form ground-level ozone faster than it can disperse. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation has issued Code Orange ozone action day alerts for the Clarksville area in multiple recent years, and Montgomery County was once formally designated an ozone nonattainment area before being redesignated to attainment in 2005.
Did wildfire smoke ever reach Clarksville?
Yes, briefly. In summer 2023, TDEC issued a Code Orange air quality alert on June 29 during a severe heat wave, and a second Code Orange alert on July 16 specifically for smoke drifting in from Canadian wildfires, which cut visibility across the region to around five miles. Wildfire smoke isn't a regular feature of Clarksville's air the way it is in the western US, but that summer showed it can still reach here.
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 Clarksville, 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 Clarksville
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