Air Quality in Davenport, Iowa — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Davenport — with free alerts the moment wildfire smoke rolls in.
AQI 26 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Davenport, Iowa is AQI 26 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 4.8 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 13 to 41. 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 Davenport: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a low 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 Davenport and Bettendorf, Rock Island, IL, Moline, IL, East Moline, IL. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Davenport
The sensors Canairy reads in Davenport agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 28-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.0 mi SSE | 13 | Good |
| 2.0 mi SSE | 16 | Good |
| 3.2 mi SSW | 37 | Good |
| 3.3 mi SSW | 41 | Good |
Most of the year, the air in Davenport is genuinely good. Scott County's fine-particle readings averaged under 11 micrograms per cubic meter every year from 2017 through 2020, comfortably inside the EPA's healthy range, with the cleanest stretches typically running May into June and again from September into October. The exception showed up hard this summer: in July 2026, wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada and Minnesota pushed the Quad Cities' air quality index to 176 — unhealthy for everyone — and triggered a joint alert from the Illinois EPA and Iowa DNR that held into the following evening.
What Canairy does for Davenport
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Davenport: 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 Davenport or across the country, on one screen.
Davenport's worst air days come from Canadian wildfire smoke, not anything local
On the afternoon of July 19, 2026, the air quality index in the Quad Cities hit 176 — squarely in the unhealthy range — before easing only slightly to 156 by 7:30 that evening. The Illinois EPA and Iowa Department of Natural Resources issued a joint air quality alert that carried into Monday. None of it started here: the smoke came from wildfires burning in Canada and Minnesota, and had already blanketed cities from Chicago to Minneapolis before it settled over Davenport and Bettendorf.
It wasn't a one-off. Barely a week later, local station WQAD was warning residents that another round of smoke was straining both lungs and air conditioners as haze rolled back through the region. That's the pattern Davenport residents are learning to watch for each summer now: clear skies one day, a brown haze and a scratchy throat the next, driven by fires hundreds of miles away that never show up on any local map.
On an ordinary day, it's dust, diesel, and fall leaf smoke
Away from smoke season, Davenport's tracked air quality data points to a much more local set of contributors: dust kicked up from surrounding farmland and gravel roads, construction sites, and — come autumn — smoke from residents burning leaves in their yards. Add in sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants and nitrogen oxides from vehicle exhaust, the building blocks of ground-level ozone, and that's most of what an ordinary bad-air day in Scott County looks like.
The numbers back up how mild that ordinary day tends to be: Scott County's annual PM2.5 average ran between 9.5 and 10.8 micrograms per cubic meter every year from 2017 to 2020 — well under the EPA's 12-microgram health standard. December has tended to be the dustiest month in that record, at 13.8 micrograms, which tracks with more wood stoves and idling engines once the cold sets in.
The river valley here doesn't trap air the way a mountain valley does
Davenport sits at 660 feet elevation on a stretch of the Mississippi River that, unusually, runs east to west instead of the river's typical north-south course, with the city strung along the Iowa bank across from Rock Island and Moline on the Illinois side. There's no ring of mountains here — the land rolls out into farmland in every direction, flat enough that Deere & Company built a major manufacturing plant right in the city.
That geography matters for air quality as much as for the view: without hills to box the valley in, smoke and haze here tend to be visitors, not residents. The July 2026 wildfire smoke arrived on the wind and cleared out again within a couple of days once the wind shifted, rather than settling in for weeks the way it can in a mountain-ringed basin out west. The same goes for everyday dust and exhaust — with nothing to trap it, it disperses quickly, which is a big part of why the county's year-round numbers stay as low as they do.
Davenport air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Davenport right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:09 AM CDT, the air quality in Davenport, Iowa is AQI 26 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.8 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did Davenport get hazy in July 2026?
Wildfire smoke from fires burning in Canada and Minnesota drifted across the Midwest, from Chicago to Minneapolis, before settling over the Quad Cities. On July 19, 2026, the air quality index reached 176 — unhealthy for everyone — prompting a joint alert from the Illinois EPA and Iowa DNR, and a second round of smoke returned about a week later.
What causes Davenport's everyday air pollution, if not wildfire smoke?
Away from smoke season, the biggest contributors are dust from surrounding farmland and gravel roads, construction sites, and smoke from burning leaves in the fall, plus sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants and vehicle exhaust that feeds ground-level ozone. Even so, Scott County's annual fine-particle average has stayed between roughly 9.5 and 10.8 micrograms per cubic meter in recent years, well inside the EPA's healthy range.
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 Davenport, 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
Go deeper
Air quality near Davenport
We watch Davenport's air. You live your life.
Set your threshold once and get a heads-up only when the air actually changes for you. Free on the App Store & Google Play.