Air Quality in Memphis, Tennessee — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Memphis — with free alerts when summer ozone climbs into unhealthy territory.
AQI 57 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Memphis, Tennessee is AQI 57 — Moderate and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 12.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 57 to 63. 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 Memphis: 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 Memphis and Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Southaven. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Memphis
The sensors Canairy reads in Memphis agree right now — all 4 sit in the Moderate band, a 6-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| City center | 57 | Moderate |
| 4.0 mi S | 58 | Moderate |
| 5.9 mi SSW | 63 | Moderate |
| 7.7 mi SSW | 57 | Moderate |
Memphis's air is unremarkable for most of the year — it's summer that changes the math. Shelby County has pulled an "F" grade for ozone in recent American Lung Association State of the Air reports, with unhealthy ozone days concentrated in the hottest, stillest stretches of July and August. The reasons are baked into both the region's weather and its economy: a humid subtropical summer that's tailor-made for ground-level ozone, layered on top of a metro built around trucks, trains, and cargo jets.
What Canairy does for Memphis
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Memphis: 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 Memphis or across the country, on one screen.
Memphis summers are Shelby County's ozone season
Ozone isn't emitted directly — it forms when sunlight cooks nitrogen oxides and volatile compounds that come mostly from vehicle and diesel exhaust, and Memphis produces plenty of both. The American Lung Association's State of the Air reports have given Shelby County an "F" grade for ozone in recent years, with unhealthy ozone days concentrated in the hottest stretches of summer.
That chemistry needs heat, sunlight, and calm air, which is exactly what a Mid-South summer supplies: a subtropical high-pressure ridge often parks over the region in July and August, bringing clear skies, light winds, and afternoon highs well into the 90s. Ozone typically peaks between 2 and 6 p.m. on those days, which is why an afternoon run is a worse idea here in August than it is in April.
The freight that built Memphis also feeds its air
Memphis International Airport has been one of the busiest cargo airports in the world for decades, anchored by FedEx's global superhub, and the region bills itself as the country's third-largest trucking corridor and fourth-largest inland port, where I-40, I-55, and I-240 all converge on the Mississippi River. All of that running diesel — trucks, freight rail, and cargo jets — is the metro's biggest source of the nitrogen oxides that turn into ozone on a hot afternoon.
It's also why Shelby County hosts one of the relatively small number of federally required "near-road" air monitors in the country, installed on the Southwest Tennessee Community College campus in 2013 specifically to measure pollution coming off the adjacent interstate. The county's Shelby Farms site has also run Tennessee's only NCore and PAMS advanced monitoring stations, operating since 2009 and 2021, tracking pollutants most of the state doesn't measure at all.
Even the Mid-South isn't immune to wildfire smoke
In June 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted more than a thousand miles south and pushed Memphis into an air quality alert, with local forecasters warning conditions could turn unhealthy for sensitive groups — part of the same smoke plume that put more than 120 million Americans across the Northeast, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic under alerts that month.
It was a genuine exception, not the rule. Memphis's day-to-day air problem is homegrown — summer ozone from heat, humidity, and traffic — rather than imported smoke, and most years pass without a repeat. But it's a reminder that a sensor network built for the ordinary local story is also what catches the unusual one.
Memphis air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Memphis right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 9:50 AM CDT, the air quality in Memphis, Tennessee is AQI 57 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 12.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Memphis get smoggy in summer?
Ground-level ozone forms when sunlight cooks vehicle and freight exhaust on hot, still days, and Memphis has plenty of both: a humid subtropical summer where highs regularly clear 90°F, and a metro built around trucking, rail, and air freight. Shelby County has received an "F" grade for ozone from the American Lung Association in recent years, with unhealthy ozone days concentrated in July and August afternoons.
Does wildfire smoke ever reach Memphis?
It's rare, but it happened in June 2023, when smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted over a thousand miles south and pushed Memphis into an air quality alert for sensitive groups — part of the same plume that put more than 120 million Americans under alerts that month. Memphis's more common air problem is homegrown summer ozone, not imported smoke.
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 Memphis, 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 Memphis
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