Air Quality in Jonesboro, Arkansas — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Jonesboro — with free alerts when fall field-burning smoke rolls in.

Live Jonesboro AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Jonesboro and Brookland, Bono, Lake City, Paragould.

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.

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.

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?

This page shows the current AQI for Jonesboro, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood.

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 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.

Where does Canairy's Jonesboro data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Jonesboro 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.

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.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.