Air Quality in New Orleans, Louisiana — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across New Orleans — with plain-English alerts when the air along the river changes.
AQI 44 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in New Orleans, Louisiana is AQI 44 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 7.9 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 24 to 52. 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 New Orleans: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a 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 New Orleans and Metairie, Kenner, Chalmette, Slidell. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in New Orleans
The sensors Canairy reads in New Orleans are 28 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 mi W | 52 | Moderate |
| 2.2 mi SSE | 46 | Good |
| 3.6 mi WSW | 24 | Good |
| 3.9 mi S | 44 | Good |
| 4.2 mi SSW | 44 | Good |
New Orleans doesn't have a wildfire smoke season the way California does — most days the air here is genuinely fine, with PM2.5 readings that meet World Health Organization guidelines and a Gulf breeze that generally clears out what does build up. The city's real air-quality story runs along the Mississippi River: New Orleans sits at the downriver end of Louisiana's petrochemical corridor, next door to one of the region's biggest refineries, and along a stretch of port and industrial traffic that can occasionally turn a calm week into a smoky one.
What Canairy does for New Orleans
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for New Orleans: 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 New Orleans or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in New Orleans is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 61 | Moderate | ozone |
Sunday, calm to light southwesterly winds will reduce dispersion, allowing pollutants to accumulate over the Bayou State. However, hot and humid conditions along with widely scattered showers and thunderstorms will aid low-level mixing. In addition, pollutant carryover will be low. As a result, AQI levels will be Good to high-Good. Monday, partly cloudy skies and scattered showers and thunderstorms will hinder ozone development. However, light and variable winds will limit dispersion. Therefore, AQI levels will range from Good to low-Moderate. Tuesday, increasing sun and highs in the mid- to upper-90s will aid ozone formation. In addition, calm to light southeasterly winds will hinder dispersion, resulting in high-Good to low-Moderate AQI levels in most locations.
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the New Orleans reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
New Orleans sits at the end of "Cancer Alley"
The stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is home to more than 350 petrochemical plants and refineries — the densest concentration in the Western Hemisphere — and locals and environmental groups have called it Cancer Alley for decades. Facilities like the Shell/Valero complex in Norco and the Denka neoprene plant in nearby LaPlace sit in the same river corridor that feeds directly into New Orleans's air, especially when the wind comes out of the west or northwest.
That corridor isn't hypothetical for New Orleans neighborhoods. When Hurricane Ida tore through St. Charles Parish in August 2021, it left the oil refineries and chemical plants around Norco flaring off gas for days as they shut down and restarted — a pattern that repeats to some degree with nearly every hurricane that threatens the river parishes. It's one reason a single citywide AQI number matters less here than knowing what a sensor near your own neighborhood is actually reading.
The Chalmette refinery is close enough to shake the city
Unlike the plants further upriver, the Chalmette Refining complex sits right at New Orleans's eastern edge in St. Bernard Parish, within a few miles of the Lower Ninth Ward and Arabi. On May 8, 2026, a fire broke out in a unit called Retreater No. 1 — where the refinery removes impurities from crude oil — after it lost containment and the released liquid hydrocarbons ignited. The blast reportedly shook homes miles away, and the fire burned for a few hours before nitrogen purging extinguished it.
The refinery reported releasing about 13.3 tons of pollutants that day, including more than 27,000 pounds of nickel-based catalyst material. The watchdog group Louisiana Bucket Brigade argued the company's own air testing didn't account for likely dust from the damaged catalyst, and noted the plant has had multiple incidents since 2023. It's the kind of event that doesn't show up in a seasonal forecast — it shows up as a sudden spike on the sensors nearest the East Bank, which is exactly what Canairy is built to catch.
Why New Orleans's worst air days tend to be short ones
New Orleans is flat and sits below sea level across much of its footprint, wedged between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain — there are no valley walls or mountains here to trap pollution overnight the way an inversion does in a place like Napa. Most of the year, onshore breezes off the Gulf keep the air moving; monitoring data compiled by IQAir puts the city's PM2.5 at around 9 micrograms per cubic meter in recent years, comfortably inside WHO guidelines, with April and October tending to run a little higher than the rest of the year.
The Port of New Orleans adds its own steady background: it's the sixth-busiest cruise port in the country and a major cargo and rail hub, and ships burning heavy fuel oil add sulfur dioxide to the mix along the river. None of that usually pushes the city into unhealthy territory on its own — but stack a slow-moving summer heat dome, port and highway traffic, and an upriver refinery event on the same still day, and the number can move more than people expect for a place with no wildfire season at all.
New Orleans air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in New Orleans right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:09 AM CDT, the air quality in New Orleans, Louisiana is AQI 44 — Good — with PM2.5 at 7.9 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does New Orleans's air quality sometimes spike without a wildfire nearby?
New Orleans has essentially no wildfire season. Its short-lived bad-air days usually trace back to the petrochemical corridor upriver, a flaring event during hurricane season when refineries shut down and restart, or an industrial incident like the May 2026 Chalmette refinery fire. A still, humid day can let any of those linger longer than a breezy one would.
Does the Chalmette refinery affect New Orleans's air quality?
It can. The Chalmette Refining complex sits in St. Bernard Parish at the city's eastern edge, close enough that a May 2026 fire in one of its units reportedly shook homes miles away and released roughly 13.3 tons of pollutants, including catalyst dust. Canairy's sensors near the East Bank and Lower Ninth Ward are the fastest way to see whether a day like that is affecting the air where you are.
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 5 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around New Orleans, 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 New Orleans
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