Air Quality in Elizabeth, New Jersey — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Elizabeth — with free alerts the moment the air quality turns unhealthy.
AQI 2 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Elizabeth, New Jersey is AQI 2 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 0.4 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 0 to 4. 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 Elizabeth: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a high 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 Elizabeth and Linden, Union, Roselle, Hillside. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Elizabeth
The sensors Canairy reads in Elizabeth agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 4-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 3.8 mi N | 0 | Good |
| 4.2 mi NNE | 4 | Good |
| 5.4 mi SE | 4 | Good |
| 5.9 mi NW | 1 | Good |
Elizabeth doesn't have a wildfire season the way California does — its everyday air quality problem is more mundane and more constant: traffic and industry that never really let up. The city is wedged between the New Jersey Turnpike, Routes 1&9, and the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, and Union County tied for the worst year-round fine particle pollution in the entire New York-Newark metro area in the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report. Summer adds a second layer: ground-level ozone cooked up by heat and tailpipe exhaust, which helped give the wider metro area an F grade and a top-15 ranking among the worst ozone regions in the country.
What Canairy does for Elizabeth
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Elizabeth: 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 Elizabeth or across the country, on one screen.
Elizabeth sits between a port and a refinery
The Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal is the largest container port on the East Coast, and it runs right along Elizabeth's eastern edge — ships, drayage trucks, and diesel cargo equipment operating close to homes in the Elizabethport neighborhood every day. Advocacy groups like Pacific Environment count Elizabeth alongside Newark's Ironbound and South Ward as a frontline community that breathes toxic emissions every day from ships, trucks and port equipment, and push for shore power so ships can plug in instead of idling their diesel engines at berth.
A few blocks past the city's southwestern border in Linden sits the Bayway Refinery, a roughly 1,300-acre Phillips 66 facility that has been refining crude oil since 1909 and now processes about 230,000 barrels a day. Between the refinery, the port, and the Turnpike and Routes 1&9 corridor that 1950s highway construction cut straight through Elizabeth's neighborhoods, the city's industrial geography is less about weather and more about what's parked, idling, or flaring nearby.
Union County's soot problem, by the numbers
The American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report tied Union County with Mercer County for the worst year-round fine particle pollution of any county in the New York-Newark metro area — a region that itself ranked 12th worst in the nation for ozone smog, with an F grade and a worsening trend. Statewide, the same report counted more than 706,882 New Jersey children breathing unhealthy air.
That combination — diesel soot that lingers close to the ground and ozone that builds on hot, sunny afternoons — is why Elizabeth's air can look unremarkable on a calm winter morning and still add up to a bad annual average. Fine particles from trucks and marine equipment don't need a heat wave to matter; they're a year-round baseline that a single citywide number can hide, which is why Canairy reads sensors near the port and highway corridors specifically rather than one faraway monitor.
The one real smoke event Elizabeth still talks about
On June 6–8, 2023, smoke from roughly 160 wildfires burning in Quebec and eastern Ontario rode a stalled weather system south and turned the sky over Elizabeth and the rest of New Jersey a hazy orange. NJ.com reported the state's air quality index hit hazardous, the worst possible rating, and smashed the record for the worst air quality day in 43 years of record-keeping. State health officials issued advisories telling residents statewide to stay indoors as PM2.5 levels spiked far above anything the region normally sees.
It was a genuine outlier, not a preview of a new annual season — Elizabeth doesn't sit anywhere near fire country, and Canadian smoke reaching this deep into the Northeast is rare enough that most residents had never seen anything like it. But it's a real reminder that the air here can turn quickly for reasons that have nothing to do with the port or the refinery, which is exactly the kind of day a live sensor reading catches before the haze is obvious outside.
Elizabeth air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Elizabeth right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 4:31 PM EDT, the air quality in Elizabeth, New Jersey is AQI 2 — Good — with PM2.5 at 0.4 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Elizabeth have worse air than nearby suburbs?
Elizabeth sits next to the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, the Bayway Refinery just over the border in Linden, and the New Jersey Turnpike and Routes 1&9 corridor, all of which add diesel and industrial particulate pollution that quieter suburbs don't have. Union County tied for the worst year-round fine particle pollution in the entire New York-Newark metro area in the American Lung Association's 2026 report.
Did the 2023 Canadian wildfires affect Elizabeth's air quality?
Yes. On June 6-8, 2023, smoke from wildfires in Quebec and Ontario pushed New Jersey's statewide air quality index to hazardous levels, the worst reading in 43 years of record-keeping, and turned the sky over Elizabeth orange. It was a rare event rather than a seasonal pattern, but it showed how quickly conditions can change 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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Elizabeth, 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 Elizabeth
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