Air Quality in Mobile, Alabama — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Mobile — with free alerts when ozone climbs on a hot, still Gulf Coast afternoon.
AQI 41 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Mobile, Alabama is AQI 41 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 7.3 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 56. 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 Mobile: 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 Mobile and Prichard, Saraland, Daphne, Spanish Fort. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Mobile
The sensors Canairy reads in Mobile are 55 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 4.6 mi W | 56 | Moderate |
| 4.8 mi NNW | 1 | Good |
| 10.8 mi W | 41 | Good |
Mobile's air, taken as a whole, is genuinely clean by national standards — the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report gave the Mobile-Daphne-Fairhope metro area a passing grade for short-term particle pollution for the 15th year running. The real story here is ground-level ozone, which builds on hot, sunny, windless summer afternoons from roughly May through September — and a city where that citywide grade hides a lot: a few miles north of downtown, the historic community of Africatown sits inside a roughly 60-mile industrial corridor and has recorded some of the worst air-toxics exposure in the state.
What Canairy does for Mobile
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Mobile: 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 Mobile or across the country, on one screen.
Ozone, not smoke, is Mobile's recurring problem
Mobile's ozone grade slipped from an A to a B in the American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report, even as the metro kept its long streak — 15 consecutive years — among the nation's cleanest for daily particle pollution. Ozone forms when sunlight cooks vehicle exhaust, port equipment, and industrial emissions together, and in a humid Gulf Coast city that reaction runs hottest on still, sunny afternoons between roughly 2 and 7 p.m., May through September.
Being on Mobile Bay complicates the picture rather than simplifying it. Researchers flying instrumented aircraft over the coast near Dauphin Island for a NASA-affiliated field study found that the afternoon Gulf breeze dilutes ozone and fine particles quickly right at the shoreline, then lets pollution concentrations climb again a few miles inland where that breeze doesn't reach. A reading from one side of the city can look nothing like a reading from the other on the same afternoon, which is exactly why a single citywide number is the wrong thing to check.
Africatown carries a heavier load than the rest of the city
Three miles north of downtown, the community founded in 1866 by survivors of the Clotilda — the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans into the United States — sits inside what local industry itself calls the Alabama Gulf Coast Chemical Corridor, a roughly 60-mile stretch of refineries, chemical plants, and rail lines. Of Mobile County's several dozen pollution-producing industries, about 30 operate within three miles of Africatown, and International Paper ran a mill on the community's doorstep from 1928 until it closed in 2000.
Residents have described airborne debris from the plant settling so thick that, in one resident's words, you couldn't see three feet in front of you, and roughly 1,200 of them sued International Paper in 2018 over dioxins, furans, and other contamination left behind after the mill closed. A 2022 environmental screening put Africatown's exposure to airborne respiratory hazards in the 95th to 100th percentile statewide — a genuinely different air-quality reality than the passing grade the wider metro earns, and the reason a single Mobile-wide reading can miss what people a few miles apart are actually breathing.
What actually helps on a high-ozone afternoon
Ozone in Mobile tracks the heat, so the practical move is timing: get outdoor workouts, yard work, and kids' recess done in the morning rather than the mid-afternoon window when ozone runs highest. On the muggiest stretches, the bigger everyday nuisance indoors is often moisture — mold and dust that never fully clear in a humid Gulf Coast house — a separate problem from the outdoor ozone number, but one that tends to show up on the same sticky, still days.
Canairy reads the PurpleAir sensors scattered across greater Mobile rather than one airport monitor, so the number you see reflects the neighborhood you actually saved — Africatown, the Port, Midtown, or wherever else you check on your way out the door.
Mobile air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Mobile right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 11:31 AM CDT, the air quality in Mobile, Alabama is AQI 41 — Good — with PM2.5 at 7.3 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Mobile's ozone get worse in summer?
Ground-level ozone forms when sunlight reacts with emissions from vehicles, the Port of Mobile, and the region's chemical and refining industry, and that reaction runs fastest on hot, still, sunny days. The American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report gave the Mobile metro a B for ozone — a step down from its previous A — with the worst readings typically falling between 2 and 7 p.m. from May through September.
Why is the air different in Africatown than the rest of Mobile?
Africatown sits inside the Alabama Gulf Coast Chemical Corridor, a roughly 60-mile stretch of refineries, chemical plants, and rail lines, with about 30 pollution-producing facilities within three miles of the community. A 2022 environmental screening put its exposure to airborne toxics in the 95th to 100th percentile statewide, which is why Canairy reads sensors near Africatown itself rather than relying on a single citywide average.
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 3 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Mobile, 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
Go deeper
Air quality near Mobile
We watch Mobile's air. You live your life.
Set your threshold once and get a heads-up only when the air actually changes for you. Free on the App Store & Google Play.