Air Quality in Dallas, Texas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Dallas — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 53 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Dallas, Texas is AQI 53 — Moderate and falling — with PM2.5 at 10.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 39 to 56. 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 Dallas: grass 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 Dallas and Irving, Garland, Mesquite, Richardson. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Dallas
The sensors Canairy reads in Dallas are 17 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 8.7 mi NE | 56 | Moderate |
| 12.2 mi WNW | 50 | Good |
| 12.9 mi NE | 56 | Moderate |
| 13.4 mi WSW | 39 | Good |
Dallas has been out of compliance with the federal ozone standard for a long time, and it keeps getting harder rather than easier. In June 2024 the EPA granted a request from the Governor of Texas to voluntarily reclassify the Dallas-Fort Worth area from Moderate to Serious for the 2015 ozone standard, effective 22 July 2024. A voluntary downgrade sounds odd until you understand what it buys: a worse label in exchange for more time and tighter required controls. The North Central Texas Council of Governments tracks the region's ozone design value through each season — it opened 2026 at 74 parts per billion and stood at 82 ppb on 27 July 2026, with the highest reading that season recorded at Frisco.
What Canairy does for Dallas
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Dallas: 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 Dallas or across the country, on one screen.
The worst ozone is usually north of you, not downtown
This surprises people who assume the freeway interchanges downtown must be the worst place to breathe. Ozone is not emitted from a tailpipe — it is made in the air when exhaust and vapours react in sunlight, and that takes hours. On a hot summer afternoon with a southerly wind, the ingredients leave the urban core and the ozone shows up downwind, which is why the region's peak monitor readings land out in the northern suburbs rather than at Dealey Plaza. Frisco held the highest reading in the 2026 season through late July.
For anyone living in Dallas proper, the practical version is this: your worst air is usually a hot, sunny, low-wind afternoon between roughly May and September, and the number peaks in the late afternoon rather than at rush hour. Morning runs are almost always better than evening ones in ozone season, which is the opposite of the instinct most people have about traffic.
Southern Dallas has carried more of the industrial load
Shingle Mountain is the case everyone in the city knows. Blue Star Recycling started operating in 2018 on land zoned industrial right beside homes in Floral Farms, in southeast Dallas, and the pile of roofing debris grew to 70,000 tons before it was hauled away. Getting the land use changed took another six years. On 12 February 2025 the Dallas City Council voted to rezone the site from mostly industrial to more agricultural uses, with District 12's Cara Mendelsohn the only member voting against — a change residents had argued for on the grounds that it makes a second Shingle Mountain harder to start.
The wider pattern that fight was about — heavy industrial zoning sitting directly against houses in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods — has not been rezoned away, and concrete batch plants and similar operations are still the day-to-day particulate sources in parts of southern Dallas. This is exactly the kind of local, block-level pollution a regional forecast cannot see. A sensor two streets from a plant tells you something the citywide AQI never will.
Dallas said no to drilling. The wells are just west
In December 2013 the Dallas City Council voted 9–6 to require a 1,500-foot setback between new gas rigs or compressor stations and protected uses like homes, businesses and churches. The previous buffer was 300 feet, so the new rule was five times as wide. Council member Lee Kleinman put the practical effect plainly during the debate: "We might as well save a lot of paper and write a one-line ordinance, saying that there will be no gas drilling in the city of Dallas." Whether it was a ban on paper or in effect, very little drilling has happened inside the city since.
That is a genuine difference between Dallas and its neighbours to the west. The Barnett Shale stretches from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex west and south across about 5,000 square miles, and the thick of the drilling — and the compressor stations, tank batteries and gathering lines that come with it — sits in Tarrant County and beyond, not under Dallas. What reaches Dallas from that direction is ozone precursors carried on the wind, not a wellhead down the block.
Dallas air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Dallas right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 9:25 AM CDT, the air quality in Dallas, Texas is AQI 53 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 10.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why is there smoke in Dallas today?
In North Texas, the thing that most often looks like smoke is dust. On 4 March 2025 a haboob out of West Texas was carried east by strong winds and turned the sky over the metroplex orange around two in the afternoon — clearly visible from downtown Dallas, downtown Fort Worth and DFW International Airport. Dust hazes the whole sky and comes with wind; smoke usually has a direction and a smell. If the sensors on this page are showing a sharp PM2.5 spike with high winds and no fire nearby, dust is the likely answer, and the advice is the same either way: close the windows and put off the outdoor workout.
Why does Dallas ozone peak in the suburbs instead of downtown?
Because ozone has to be made before it can be measured. Exhaust and solvent vapours are not ozone; they become ozone over several hours of reacting in sunlight, by which time a southerly summer wind has carried them out of the urban core. That is why the highest monitor readings in the region land north of Dallas — Frisco recorded the season's highest through late July 2026 — while downtown, with all its traffic, often reads lower on the same day.
Are there gas wells in Dallas?
Effectively no, and that was a deliberate decision. In December 2013 the city council voted 9–6 to widen the required setback between new gas rigs or compressor stations and homes, businesses and churches from 300 feet to 1,500 feet. Industry called it a de facto ban and there has been very little drilling inside the city since. The Barnett Shale itself runs from the metroplex west and south across roughly 5,000 square miles, so the active wells are mostly in Tarrant County and further out.
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 Dallas, 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 Dallas
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