Air Quality in Morgantown, West Virginia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Morgantown — with free alerts when valley air turns unhealthy.
AQI 22 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Morgantown, West Virginia is AQI 22 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 4.0 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 22 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 Morgantown: 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 Morgantown and Star City, Westover, Granville, Cheat Lake. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Morgantown
The sensors Canairy reads in Morgantown agree right now — all 2 sit in the Good band, a 0-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 7.2 mi E | 22 | Good |
| 11.0 mi SE | 22 | Good |
Morgantown's air is unremarkable most of the year, but the Monongahela River valley the city sits in doesn't forgive it easily when things go wrong. Two coal-fired power plants sit within ten miles of downtown, the region's hills trap still air on calm days, and every so often — as happened in June 2023 — smoke from Canadian wildfires drifts hundreds of miles south and settles over north-central West Virginia. The American Lung Association's most recent report actually downgraded both Morgantown's ozone and short-term particle pollution grades from an A to a B, a sign that summer haze here is a real, worsening pattern rather than a non-issue.
What Canairy does for Morgantown
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Morgantown: 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 Morgantown or across the country, on one screen.
Why a river valley town gets stuck with its own air
Morgantown sits at around 860 feet along the Monongahela River, with hills on both sides rising past 1,200 feet — Sky Rock in Dorsey Knob Park tops out near 1,398 feet, and Coopers Rock to the east climbs to 2,000 feet or more. That kind of terrain is exactly what forms a temperature inversion: on calm, clear nights, cool air sinks into the valley and gets capped by a layer of warmer air above it, and whatever is in that cool air near the ground — car exhaust, wood smoke, power plant emissions — has nowhere to go until the sun burns the cap off the next morning.
It is the same setup that has made the wider Monongahela Valley a byword for trapped industrial air going back generations, and it still applies today even though the region's heavy industry has thinned out. On a still winter morning, the fog sitting over the river in downtown Morgantown or across the water in Star City is a visible reminder that the valley's air doesn't always leave when you'd like it to.
Two coal plants sit just outside town
The Longview Power Plant, a 710-megawatt coal-fired station, sits about five miles north of Morgantown near Maidsville, and the Fort Martin Power Plant — a 1,098-megawatt coal facility also along the Monongahela — sits roughly ten miles northeast, also near Maidsville. Both plants have modern pollution controls, including selective catalytic reduction and flue gas desulfurization, which cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide output compared with older coal plants of the same size. Even so, two large coal-fired stations sharing the same river valley and airshed as the city is a genuine, ongoing factor in Morgantown's particle and ozone-precursor pollution, and both owners have signaled an eventual shift toward gas-fired generation over the next decade.
Natural gas drilling adds a second, less visible source. Monongalia County sits over the Marcellus Shale, and WVU's own Marcellus Shale Energy and Environmental Laboratory, sited near Morgantown, has published research finding measurable local air-quality impacts — including elevated particulate matter — during the horizontal drilling phase of well development, on top of the diesel engine traffic that supports it. None of this makes Morgantown a heavy-industry city the way it once was, but it does mean the valley's air carries a real, identifiable mix of combustion sources beyond just cars and furnaces.
When smoke arrives from somewhere else entirely
Morgantown doesn't sit anywhere near a fire-prone landscape, but that didn't spare it in late June 2023, when smoke from wildfires burning in Quebec and Ontario drifted south across the entire eastern half of the country. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection issued an air quality alert covering the northern half of the state, and Morgantown's own Dominion Post reported the smoke settling visibly over north-central West Virginia along with the rest of the region.
It was an unusual event for this part of Appalachia, and it's unlikely to happen every summer — but it proved that Morgantown's air isn't only shaped by what's happening in the valley itself. A fire a thousand miles away, combined with the right wind pattern, can put the city under the same kind of smoke advisory that Western cities deal with far more routinely.
Morgantown air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Morgantown right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 11:42 AM EDT, the air quality in Morgantown, West Virginia is AQI 22 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.0 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Morgantown's air quality get worse in summer?
Ground-level ozone is Morgantown's most persistent air-quality problem, and the American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report downgraded the area's ozone grade from an A to a B. Hot, sunny days combine vehicle exhaust and emissions from the Longview and Fort Martin coal plants nearby to form ozone, and the surrounding hills can trap that haze in the river valley until a weather front clears it out.
Did Canadian wildfire smoke ever reach Morgantown?
Yes. In late June 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in Quebec and Ontario drifted south and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection issued an air quality alert covering the northern half of the state, including Morgantown. It was a rare event for this region, but it showed that fires far outside Appalachia can still affect the air here under the right winds.
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 2 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Morgantown, 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 Morgantown
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