Air Quality in Evansville, Indiana — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Evansville — with free alerts when the air in the Tri-State area changes.

Live Evansville AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Evansville and Newburgh, Mount Vernon, Henderson, Boonville.

For most of the year, Evansville's air quality sits in the Good-to-Moderate range you'd expect from a mid-sized Ohio River city. What makes this corner of Indiana different is what surrounds it: Vanderburgh, Posey, and Warrick counties sit inside one of the densest clusters of coal-fired power generation left in the Midwest, and a 2016 USA Today investigation found fine-particle pollution here running almost as high as Manhattan's.

Summer is when it's most likely to matter — hot, humid, stagnant days give the region's power plants and refineries more room to cook up ozone and haze before a front finally clears it out. Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.

Evansville sits inside one of the Midwest's densest coal corridors

Six large coal-fired power plant complexes have operated within about 30 miles of Evansville — an unusual concentration for a metro area this size. The closest is CenterPoint Energy's A.B. Brown Generating Station, just 5 miles southwest of downtown on the Ohio River; its coal units ran until October 2023, when they were replaced by natural gas turbines that came online in 2025. Roughly 30 miles downriver to the east sits American Electric Power's Rockport Generating Station, a 2,600-megawatt plant with the tallest smokestack in Indiana at 1,038 feet — both of its units are scheduled to retire by the end of 2028 under a settlement AEP reached with the EPA and the Sierra Club.

The cluster doesn't stop at the city limits. Alcoa's aluminum smelter near Newburgh, Evansville's easternmost suburb, has run its own power-hungry operation since 1957, and Henderson, Kentucky — about 10 miles south across the Ohio River — layers in its own aluminum production and coal mining, with more than 2.8 million tons of coal produced in Henderson County in a recent year. None of this means Evansville's air is bad every day, but it explains why the region's baseline has historically run higher than a typical Midwest city its size.

A 2016 investigation put a number on it

USA Today's 2016 investigation "Meet America's Super Polluters" singled out Vanderburgh County, finding fine-particle (PM2.5) levels almost as high as Manhattan, New York City — a striking comparison for a metro of roughly 180,000 people. The finding reflected the compounding effect of the coal plants ringing the city plus the industrial corridor just west in Posey County.

Mount Vernon, about 15 miles west along the river, is home to a CountryMark oil refinery processing more than 20,000 barrels of crude oil a day and a SABIC plastics plant (built originally as a GE Plastics facility) — both permitted industrial sources sitting in the same airshed Evansville can end up downwind of. It's this combination of point sources, not any single smokestack, that has kept Evansville's particle numbers higher than the city's size alone would suggest.

Summer heat and river-valley air do the rest

Evansville sits in a shallow bend of the Ohio River that locals have long nicknamed the "Crescent Valley" — low rolling hills around a city that sits at just 384 feet of elevation. The area's humid subtropical climate brings hot, sticky summers, with July averaging near 78°F, which are exactly the conditions that help nitrogen oxides and VOCs from the surrounding plants and highway traffic cook into ground-level ozone.

On still, sunny summer afternoons, that combination can push ozone into the range the EPA and the American Lung Association's annual State of the Air report track when they grade metro areas for ozone and particle-pollution days. Winters are easier on air quality — cold fronts move through the valley and clear things out fast — but summer is when it actually pays to check the number instead of assuming it's fine.

Evansville air quality FAQ

What is the air quality in Evansville right now?

This page shows the current AQI for Evansville, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and the surrounding Ohio River valley, updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood, whether that's Downtown, the West Side, or out toward Newburgh.

Why does Evansville's air quality lag other Midwest cities its size?

Vanderburgh County sits inside one of the region's densest clusters of coal-fired power generation, with plants like A.B. Brown and AEP's Rockport station within about 30 miles, plus an oil refinery and a plastics plant just west in Mount Vernon. A 2016 USA Today investigation found fine-particle pollution here running almost as high as Manhattan's, driven by that industrial concentration rather than any single source.

Does Evansville still have coal plants running nearby?

Fewer than it used to. A.B. Brown's coal units, five miles southwest of the city, were retired in October 2023 and replaced with natural gas turbines in 2025. AEP's Rockport Generating Station, about 30 miles east, is scheduled to retire both of its units by the end of 2028. Until then, both remain part of the regional airshed Canairy tracks for Evansville.

What AQI level is unhealthy?

Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0–50 is Good and 51–100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions — and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.

Is Canairy free?

Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.

Where does Canairy's Evansville data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Evansville and surrounding towns, cross-referenced with government monitors and the Google Air Quality API. You can see every sensor behind your numbers on the live map — there's no black box.

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