Air Quality in Jonesboro, Arkansas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Jonesboro — with free alerts when fall field-burning smoke rolls in.
AQI 60 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Jonesboro, Arkansas is AQI 60 — Moderate and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 14.1 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 59 to 62. 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 Jonesboro: weeds 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 Jonesboro and Brookland, Bono, Lake City, Paragould. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Jonesboro
The sensors Canairy reads in Jonesboro agree right now — all 2 sit in the Moderate band, a 3-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 mi E | 62 | Moderate |
| 2.2 mi SW | 59 | Moderate |
Most of the year, Jonesboro's air is unremarkable in the best sense — this is flat Delta farm country, not a smog-prone metro or a wildfire-exposed canyon town. The exception is fall harvest season, when rice growers across Craighead County burn off the stubble left in their fields, and on a still, humid afternoon that smoke can roll straight into the city, thick enough that downtown residents have called 911 thinking a building was on fire.
What Canairy does for Jonesboro
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Jonesboro: 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 Jonesboro or across the country, on one screen.
Jonesboro's fall haze comes from the rice harvest, not wildfire
Craighead County farms roughly 70,000 acres of rice, a slice of the more than 1 million acres grown statewide, and after harvest many growers burn the leftover stubble because it is by far the cheapest way to clear a field for spring planting — about three cents for a match versus roughly a hundred dollars an acre to disc the residue under. When the wind carries it the wrong way, that smoke doesn't stay in the fields: on one October afternoon it settled thick enough over downtown Jonesboro that several residents called in a suspected structure fire before realizing the haze was coming from burning rice stubble outside town.
Growers are asked to follow a voluntary smoke management plan — checking that wind stays under 15 mph and relative humidity above 20 percent before lighting a field — but even a well-timed burn can go wrong if a temperature inversion settles in afterward and traps the smoke near the ground instead of letting it disperse. A retired Jonesboro pediatrician, Warren Skaug, used his own EPA-grade monitoring equipment to track this: on October 20, 2017, he measured carbon particulate levels of 156.2 micrograms per cubic meter in nearby Newport, well into the 'unhealthy for everyone' range that starts at 55.5.
The smoke shows up in Craighead County's health data, not just its skies
A 2021 study comparing emergency-department visits in Craighead County against Sebastian County — a similarly sized Arkansas county without heavy rice-field burning — found a 21 percent increase in asthma visits and a 17 percent increase in COPD visits during the 2014-2016 study period, tracking closely with local PM2.5 spikes. Local medical providers report the same pattern every fall: more patients coming in with asthma flare-ups, bronchitis, sinusitis, and worsening COPD once burning season starts.
The risk isn't only respiratory. In October 2022, smoke from a rice-field fire in neighboring Jackson County drifted across U.S. Highway 167 and cut visibility so badly that a 16-vehicle pileup killed two people and injured six others; the person responsible for the fire was charged with a Class D felony for reckless burning. That crash is part of why state Rep. Fran Cavenaugh, who represents part of northeast Arkansas, worked with the Farm Bureau and Rice Federation on legislation for the 2025 session to add real fines and a farmer weather hotline — because right now the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality can monitor agricultural burning but has no power to enforce against it, and county sheriffs can't order a burn ban on farmland.
Why Jonesboro doesn't fit the valley-smoke-trap story
Jonesboro sits at what locals call the hub of Crowley's Ridge, a narrow band of forested upland that rises as much as 200 feet above the otherwise dead-flat Mississippi Alluvial Plain surrounding it on every side. Unlike a mountain-ringed valley that physically traps polluted air, there's no bowl here — the row-crop farmland stretching out from the city in every direction is as flat as it gets. When Jonesboro's air turns bad, it's a weather problem, not a terrain problem: calm winds and a low temperature inversion holding smoke close to the ground for a few hours until conditions change.
That's also why the bad air is so seasonal and specific. Outside the fall burn window, Craighead County has comparatively little heavy industry and no port or refinery driving day-to-day pollution, so most of the year the story here really is just ordinary Delta farm-country air. The two or three weeks a year when smoke settles over the city are the exception that actually matters, which is exactly the kind of thing a citywide average AQI can miss if you're not watching the sensor nearest you.
Jonesboro air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Jonesboro right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 9:39 AM CDT, the air quality in Jonesboro, Arkansas is AQI 60 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 14.1 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Jonesboro get smoky in the fall?
Each fall after rice harvest, growers across Craighead County burn leftover stubble to clear their fields cheaply for spring planting. Most burns follow voluntary wind and humidity guidelines, but if a temperature inversion settles in afterward, the smoke can get trapped near the ground and drift into Jonesboro itself instead of dispersing. A 2017 measurement by a local pediatrician found particulate levels in the 'unhealthy for everyone' range during one such event.
Is agricultural burning regulated in Arkansas?
Only loosely. Arkansas's smoke management plan for rice-field burning is voluntary, and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality can monitor conditions but has no enforcement power over agricultural burns; county sheriffs also cannot order a burn ban on farmland. After a fatal 2022 highway crash caused by field-fire smoke in nearby Jackson County, state lawmakers began pushing for real fines and better coordination starting with the 2025 legislative session.
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 2 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Jonesboro, 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 Jonesboro
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