Air Quality in El Paso, Texas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across El Paso — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 15 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in El Paso, Texas is AQI 15 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.7 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 28. 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 El Paso: 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 El Paso and Socorro, Horizon City, Canutillo, Sunland Park. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in El Paso
The sensors Canairy reads in El Paso agree right now — all 3 sit in the Good band, a 27-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 3.6 mi ENE | 1 | Good |
| 5.7 mi E | 28 | Good |
| 8.8 mi E | 15 | Good |
El Paso sits in a desert basin at 3,740 feet, wrapped around the southern end of the Franklin Mountains, which run down from the north and nearly split the city in two. On the other side of the Rio Grande is Ciudad Juárez, and the two cities share a single airshed. El Paso County has been designated a Moderate PM10 nonattainment area since the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments and, as of mid-2026, still is: one of the last coarse-particle nonattainment areas left in the country. Texas invoked Section 179B of the Clean Air Act here, the provision written for areas that would meet the standard were it not for emissions transported from outside the United States.
What Canairy does for El Paso
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for El Paso: 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 El Paso or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in El Paso is doing next
| When | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|
| Today | Moderate | ozone |
| Tomorrow | Moderate | ozone |
| Sunday | Moderate | ozone |
https://www.tceq.texas.gov/airquality/monops/forecast_today.html
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the El Paso reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
One airshed, two countries, and a queue of trucks in the middle
The Paso del Norte basin holds more than 2.7 million people across El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and Las Cruces, the second-largest transborder urban area on the US-Mexico frontier. Vehicles are its single largest contributor to air pollution, and the crossings concentrate them: in 2018 the El Paso ports handled over two million northbound car crossings and 844,000 truck crossings, with vehicles idling in line for hours at a time. Ciudad Juárez also hosts more than 320 factories, over 60 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Chihuahua.
The regulatory record reflects that geography plainly. When El Paso missed its 1994 PM10 attainment deadline, modelling showed the area would have met the standard if not for emissions transported from outside the United States, and Texas used Section 179B accordingly. The city's old carbon monoxide nonattainment area was not centred on downtown at all but on a narrow strip along the Rio Grande adjacent to Juárez. In the American Lung Association's 2023 report, the region ranked 14th worst for urban air quality in the United States.
Dust is the pollutant that defines El Paso, and it is not PM2.5
Spring is the wind season in the Chihuahuan Desert, and 2025 was the worst dust year the region has had since the Dust Bowl. El Paso averages around 22 dusty days a year. By late April 2025 it had already logged 28, and the year finished near 50. Particulate readings at the federal monitor in Socorro were the highest for that point in the year since at least 2000. Researchers put the run down to a combination of record heat and multi-year drought across Chihuahua, New Mexico and West Texas, and warn that seasons like it may stop being unusual.
Blowing dust is mostly coarse material, PM10, which is precisely why El Paso's nonattainment designation is for PM10 rather than for fine particles. The sensors behind this page report PM2.5. A dust event will still move that number, because plenty of fine material comes up with the coarse, but the reading will understate what you can see and feel. If the Franklins have vanished behind a brown wall, treat the day as worse than the AQI says.
El Paso is in attainment for ozone, by court order
The EPA designated El Paso County Marginal nonattainment for the 2015 ozone standard effective 30 December 2021. On 30 June 2023 the D.C. Circuit vacated that designation, finding the agency had acted impermissibly retroactively because the attainment deadline had already passed by the time it acted, and the county reverted to attainment or unclassifiable. Sunland Park, New Mexico, a few miles across the state line, kept its nonattainment status.
That is a legal outcome rather than a measurement, and it is worth reading it as one. Nothing about the ruling changed the air over the basin. It is a useful reminder that a designation describes a regulatory process at least as much as it describes what is above your street.
El Paso air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in El Paso right now?
As of September 11, 2026 at 6:10 AM MDT, the air quality in El Paso, Texas is AQI 15 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.7 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is the air hazy in El Paso today?
In El Paso the usual answer is dust rather than smoke. Spring is the wind season across the Chihuahuan Desert, and blowing dust can cut visibility to the point where the Franklin Mountains disappear. 2025 was the region's worst dust year since the Dust Bowl, with roughly 50 dusty days against a normal near 22. The other common cause is vehicle exhaust concentrating along the river corridor, which is exactly where El Paso's old carbon monoxide nonattainment area sat. Genuine wildfire smoke reaching El Paso is comparatively rare.
Does El Paso's air come from Ciudad Juárez?
Some of it does, and the US government has formally acknowledged as much. When El Paso failed its PM10 attainment deadline in 1994, modelling showed the area would have met the standard if not for emissions transported from outside the United States, and Texas invoked Section 179B of the Clean Air Act on that basis. It works in both directions. The two cities sit in one basin holding more than 2.7 million people, with hundreds of factories on the Juárez side and hours of idling traffic at the crossings between them. Neither city can fix its air on its own.
Is El Paso still a nonattainment area?
For PM10, yes. El Paso County has been classified Moderate nonattainment for coarse particles since the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments and remained on the EPA's list as of mid-2026, one of very few left nationally. For ozone it is currently attainment or unclassifiable: the EPA designated the county Marginal nonattainment in December 2021, but the D.C. Circuit vacated that in June 2023. Carbon monoxide was redesignated to attainment back in August 2008.
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 3 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around El Paso, 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 El Paso
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