Air Quality in Kenosha, Wisconsin — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Kenosha — with free alerts when summer ozone climbs along the lakeshore.
AQI 3 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Kenosha, Wisconsin is AQI 3 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 0.5 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. 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 Kenosha: 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 Kenosha and Pleasant Prairie, Somers, Racine, Twin Lakes. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Most of the year, Kenosha's air is unremarkable in the best way — a Lake Michigan breeze, no wildfire smoke season, and nothing like the wood-stove inversions that plague colder inland cities. The real story here is narrower and more specific: summer ozone, driven less by anything happening in Kenosha itself than by what blows up the shoreline from Chicago and Gary, Indiana.
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A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Kenosha: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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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.
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Kenosha's ozone problem starts in Illinois, not Wisconsin
Kenosha County is officially part of the "Chicago, IL-IN-WI" ozone nonattainment area — the EPA's way of saying the summer smog here can't be managed as a Wisconsin-only problem, because the nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds that cook into ozone are largely produced by Chicago and Gary traffic and industry and carried north on southerly winds. Wisconsin's slice of that same nonattainment zone was reclassified from marginal to moderate on October 7, 2022, after missing its August 3, 2021 attainment deadline, then bumped again toward serious on December 17, 2024, for missing the moderate deadline of August 3, 2024 — though the Seventh Circuit stayed that move on September 5, 2025 while the state appeals. It's not the first time: under the previous federal ozone standard, this same stretch of shoreline was downgraded from moderate to serious back in 2019.
The mechanism is Lake Michigan itself. In Wisconsin's own court filings defending the state's air, regulators describe ozone here as "driven by emissions from upwind states, compounded by the meteorological effects of Lake Michigan" — a reference to the lake breeze that develops on hot, sunny days, when cooler air rolling off the water pushes inland pollution back toward the shoreline in the afternoon and effectively recirculates it instead of letting it disperse. That's why the worst ozone readings in this part of Wisconsin tend to hug the lakefront rather than spread evenly across the county.
Chiwaukee Prairie has some of the highest ozone readings in the state
Just south of the city, along the lakeshore near the Wisconsin-Illinois state line, the DNR's Chiwaukee Prairie monitor posted a 2023–2025 ozone design value of 79 parts per billion — the highest of any monitor in Wisconsin, with Racine's monitor close behind at 76 ppb. It's not a coincidence that the state's worst reading sits at the very southern tip of the Wisconsin shoreline, closest to the Chicago-Gary corridor the plume travels from.
None of this makes Kenosha a year-round pollution story. Ozone is strictly a warm-weather, sunlight-driven pollutant, so the season that matters runs roughly May through September and peaks on hot, clear, light-wind afternoons — the exact conditions that let the lake breeze recirculate exhaust instead of blowing it out. Outside those months, and even on overcast or breezy summer days, Kenosha's air is typically in the Good to Moderate range.
The county's biggest smokestack is already gone
For decades, the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant just south of the city was Wisconsin's second-largest coal-fired power station — 1,210 megawatts owned by We Energies, and a major local source of both nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide. We Energies retired it in April 2018, citing cheaper natural gas and renewables, which quietly removed Kenosha County's largest stationary source of ozone precursors right as the region's nonattainment fight was heating up.
That closure is part of why Kenosha's ozone problem now reads almost entirely as an imported one rather than a local-industry one: the county's own emissions have shrunk, but the summer transport from Chicago and Gary hasn't. On an ozone advisory day, the practical move is the same one anyone doing hard outdoor exercise, running, or yard work along the lakefront in Kenosha should already know — shift it earlier or later than the mid-afternoon peak, since that's when sunlight has had the most time to build ozone out of the day's traffic and industrial exhaust.
Kenosha air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Kenosha right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:09 AM CDT, the air quality in Kenosha, Wisconsin is AQI 3 — Good — with PM2.5 at 0.5 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Kenosha get bad ozone in the summer?
Kenosha County is part of the federally designated Chicago, IL-IN-WI ozone nonattainment area, meaning its summer smog is treated as a shared problem with Chicago and Gary, Indiana, not a local one. Nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds from that corridor drift north along Lake Michigan, and a lake breeze on hot, sunny days can push that pollution back toward the shoreline instead of letting it disperse, which is why readings tend to run highest right along the lakefront on the worst afternoons, roughly May through September.
Is Kenosha's air quality bad all year?
No. Ozone is a warm-weather pollutant that needs strong sunlight to form, so the season that matters runs roughly May through September and peaks on hot, clear, light-wind afternoons. Outside that window, and on breezier or overcast summer days, Kenosha's air is typically Good to Moderate - the county's largest stationary pollution source, the coal-fired Pleasant Prairie Power Plant, also shut down in 2018.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Kenosha, 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 Kenosha
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