Air Quality in Moreno Valley, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Moreno Valley — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 16 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Moreno Valley, California is AQI 16 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 2.8 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 22. 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 Moreno Valley: 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 Moreno Valley and Riverside, Perris, March Air Reserve Base, Mead Valley. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Moreno Valley
The sensors Canairy reads in Moreno Valley agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 21-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 5.2 mi WNW | 1 | Good |
| 6.8 mi WNW | 22 | Good |
| 7.1 mi N | 20 | Good |
| 8.2 mi NE | 11 | Good |
Moreno Valley shares the Inland Empire's imported smog, but it also has something no neighbouring city does: the World Logistics Center, a planned 40,600,000 square feet of warehouses on the eastern edge of town. It has been argued over in court since 2015. South Coast AQMD sued Moreno Valley twice over whether the project's environmental report did enough about air quality, and a second case brought by five environmental groups was won outright in 2018 before both were settled. According to the air district's own February 2026 board papers, the first building was expected to receive its certificate of occupancy in the first quarter of 2026. In other words, the traffic all those agreements were written about is only now beginning to arrive.
What Canairy does for Moreno Valley
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Moreno Valley: 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 Moreno Valley or across the country, on one screen.
The warehouse project the air district sued over twice
Moreno Valley certified the environmental impact report for the World Logistics Center in August 2015 and granted the land use approvals. South Coast AQMD filed suit in Riverside Superior Court the following month, arguing the report did not comply with the California Environmental Quality Act, and filed again in February 2016 over the ballot initiatives the city adopted in November 2015 in response. The district lost the judgment in September 2016 but kept its position that the air quality mitigation in the EIR was inadequate, and in October 2016 the city, the developer Highland Fairview and the district signed a settlement instead. Under it, Highland Fairview pays an Air Quality Improvement Fee of 64 cents per square foot of every building it completes, payable when the certificate of occupancy is issued, and the district may spend the money on anything that improves air quality in the South Coast Air Basin.
The separate lawsuit was brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, the Coalition for Clean Air, the San Bernardino Valley Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, represented by Earthjustice. Their core objection was traffic: the project as approved was projected to add around 14,000 truck trips a day. On 8 February 2018 a Riverside County judge agreed the environmental study was inadequate and ordered further work.
What the 2021 settlement actually bought
That case settled on 29 April 2021 in a deal the groups valued at up to 47 million dollars, and it is unusually specific. Up to 12.1 million dollars goes toward 680 new electric trucks for regional use. The site has to install 1,080 passenger vehicle chargers. Rooftop solar has to cover half of each warehouse's energy demand. Five million dollars is set aside for air filtration, noise mitigation, berms and screening at nearby homes, four million for conservation around the San Jacinto Wildlife Area next door, and 1.1 million for a grant programme giving 1,000 local residents 1,000 dollars each toward an electric vehicle.
It is worth being straight about what that does and does not do. Electrifying a share of the fleet and putting filters in the houses closest to the fence line reduces the diesel exhaust that would otherwise land on Moreno Valley, but it does not remove the trucks, and the buildings are being finished one at a time over a period of years. If you live on the east side of the city, the honest answer is that the air around you is going to change gradually as buildings open, and a sensor on your own block will tell you more about that than any projection in an environmental report.
March Air Reserve Base is quieter than it was
The base on Moreno Valley's southwestern edge is a working military airfield that also hosts civilian cargo flights. Amazon Air started flying out of March in 2018, after the March Joint Powers Commission voted 6 to 2 to allow up to ten flights a day, five in and five out. It never reached that. By the end it was running about three arrivals and three departures a day, and Amazon closed the operation in May 2025, moving its Prime Air flights to San Bernardino International Airport and offering its roughly 400 staff transfers.
That means one of the more visible local sources of aircraft and truck activity has gone quiet, at least for now. Proposals to expand civilian aviation at March keep coming back, and they keep drawing objections from residents about noise and pollution, so this is a part of the city's air story worth watching rather than one that is settled.
Moreno Valley air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Moreno Valley right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Moreno Valley, California is AQI 16 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.8 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Moreno Valley today?
Most days it is not from here. Brush fires that start locally, in the Badlands along the 60 or up Reche Canyon, tend to be small and quickly contained, in the tens of acres rather than the thousands. The smoke that actually pushes Moreno Valley's AQI up usually comes from a larger fire elsewhere in Riverside or San Bernardino County and arrives on the wind hours after it started, which is why the sky can look hazy with nothing burning anywhere near you. If the haze is even, has no visible plume and no smell of fresh smoke, it is more likely to be the regional smog layer than a fire.
Will the World Logistics Center make the air worse?
The project was approved on the basis that it would add around 14,000 truck trips a day, and that number is what both lawsuits were about. The settlements attached real conditions to it: a 64 cent per square foot air quality fee paid to South Coast AQMD on every completed building, up to 12.1 million dollars for 680 electric trucks, 1,080 on-site chargers, rooftop solar covering half of each building's power, and five million dollars for air filtration and screening at nearby homes. Buildings are being completed gradually, with the first certificate of occupancy expected in early 2026, so the effect will build over years rather than arriving all at once. Watching a sensor near your home is the only way to see it happening on your street.
Does March Air Reserve Base affect the air here?
It is an active airfield, so there are aircraft and ground vehicle emissions associated with it, but its civilian cargo side has shrunk rather than grown. Amazon Air operated there from 2018 until May 2025, never running more than about three arrivals and three departures a day toward the end, and then moved those flights to San Bernardino International Airport. Proposals to expand civilian aviation at March come up periodically and are usually opposed by residents on noise and pollution grounds, so it is a source worth keeping an eye on.
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 Moreno Valley, 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 Moreno Valley
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