Air Quality in Long Beach, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Long Beach — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 31 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Long Beach, California is AQI 31 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 5.6 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 23 to 32. 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 Long Beach: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a very low 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 Long Beach and Signal Hill, Lakewood, Seal Beach, Carson. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Long Beach
The sensors Canairy reads in Long Beach agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 9-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.4 mi ENE | 31 | Good |
| 4.5 mi N | 32 | Good |
| 6.6 mi E | 30 | Good |
| 6.9 mi SW | 23 | Good |
Long Beach lives next door to the second-busiest container port in the United States, and that shows up in the air. The Port of Long Beach and the I-710 freeway that feeds it put diesel exhaust through the western side of the city every day — more than 20,000 trucks a day on stretches of the 710, over twice the Los Angeles freeway average. The port has cut deeply since 2005, with diesel particulates down more than 90 percent by its 2022 emissions inventory, but the Westside and Wrigley neighborhoods still start from a worse baseline than the rest of the city, and wildfire smoke from elsewhere in Los Angeles County arrives on top of that.
What Canairy does for Long Beach
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Long Beach: 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 Long Beach or across the country, on one screen.
Why the west side of town breathes differently
The I-710 corridor is one of the most studied pollution corridors in California. USC's Neighborhood Data for Social Change project found that the twenty neighborhoods along the 710, running from the ports north toward central Los Angeles, average 36 percent more particulate matter than Los Angeles County as a whole, and account for roughly 20 percent of all particulate emissions in Southern California. Residents there average 62 asthma-related emergency room visits per 10,000 people; in neighborhoods that are more than 70 percent white, the figure is 30.
That burden is concentrated, not citywide. When the container backlog peaked in 2021 at 79 ships waiting at anchor, the California Air Resources Board estimated the extra cargo movement was adding about 14.5 tons of nitrogen oxides a day on top of a port complex already putting out roughly 100 tons a day. A citywide average is not much use if you live near the 710.
The port has cleaned up a lot, and it isn't finished
The San Pedro Bay ports' Clean Air Action Plan has produced real numbers. Measured against a 2005 baseline, the Port of Long Beach's 2022 emissions inventory showed diesel particulates down 91 percent, nitrogen oxides down 63 percent and sulfur oxides down 97 percent, while cargo volume rose 36 percent. California's At-Berth rule now requires container, cruise and refrigerated cargo ships to plug into shore power or capture their emissions instead of idling their auxiliary engines.
The targets ahead are zero-emission cargo handling equipment by 2030 and zero-emission drayage trucks by 2035. Whether those hold is contested, and in the meantime the ports still emit roughly 23 tons of nitrogen oxides and half a ton of fine particles a day. Shore power addresses a ship's auxiliary engines at berth — it does not touch the trucks, the yard equipment, the trains, or a ship's main engines while it is moving.
It isn't only the port
Long Beach sits on top of an oil field. A February 2026 analysis counted more than 750 active wells and 378 idle wells across Long Beach and Signal Hill, plus more than 2,900 already plugged. The idle derricks cut a diagonal line across the city through Signal Hill toward the Traffic Circle, with more southeast of Recreation Park through the Los Cerritos Wetlands.
Uncapped wells can leak benzene and formaldehyde, and in Los Angeles County 86 percent of idle wells sit within a kilometre of a school, hospital, playground or park. Worth knowing, and worth being clear about: neighbourhood air sensors pick up general particulate conditions, but they do not measure benzene or other specific gases.
Long Beach air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Long Beach right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 5:09 AM PDT, the air quality in Long Beach, California is AQI 31 — Good — with PM2.5 at 5.6 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Long Beach today?
Usually it has drifted in from a fire somewhere else in Los Angeles County rather than anything burning nearby. In January 2025 the city issued its own air quality warning as smoke from the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires pushed south, with PM2.5 across central and southwest Los Angeles County running from Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups up to Hazardous. In November 2018 the Woolsey and Hill fires put Long Beach under a smoke advisory from eighty miles away. If there is no fire in the news, haze on a still day is more likely traffic and port emissions sitting under an inversion.
Is the air worse in West Long Beach than the rest of the city?
The evidence says yes. West Long Beach sits between the port complex and the I-710, and reporting in 2025 found life expectancy there runs about eight years shorter than in wealthier neighbourhoods farther from the ports. Community advocates have described the Westside as carrying among the state's highest asthma rates. This is exactly why a citywide average is not much use if you live near the freeway.
Does the port still pollute if the ships are plugged in?
Shore power addresses one source — a ship's auxiliary engines while it sits at berth. It does not touch the trucks moving containers off the terminal, the yard equipment, the trains, or the ships' main engines while they are moving. That is why the Clean Air Action Plan sets separate 2030 and 2035 deadlines for cargo handling equipment and drayage trucks.
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 Long Beach, 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 Long Beach
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