Air Quality in Newport News, Virginia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Newport News — with plain-English alerts when summer ozone climbs toward unhealthy.
AQI 61 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Newport News, Virginia is AQI 61 — Moderate and falling — with PM2.5 at 14.6 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 39 to 62. 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 Newport News: 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 Newport News and Hampton, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Poquoson. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Newport News
The sensors Canairy reads in Newport News are 23 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 S | 62 | Moderate |
| 2.3 mi ESE | 39 | Good |
| 3.1 mi NE | 59 | Moderate |
| 3.8 mi N | 61 | Moderate |
Newport News sits at the mouth of the James River, and for most of the year its air is unremarkable in the best way — this isn't a wildfire-smoke city like the ones out West. The story here is heat: on hot, still, humid summer afternoons, tailpipe and industrial exhaust from the Hampton Roads shipping and highway corridors cooks into ground-level ozone, and that's when the numbers move.
What Canairy does for Newport News
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Newport News: 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 Newport News or across the country, on one screen.
Newport News once had a real ozone problem — and fixed it
The EPA's Green Book lists Newport News as a marginal nonattainment area for both the 1979 one-hour and 1997 eight-hour ozone standards, part of the wider Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News (Hampton Roads) nonattainment area. Neighboring Hampton, York County, Virginia Beach, and Chesapeake were all redesignated to maintenance status back on July 28, 1997 — Newport News took a decade longer, only clearing the bar on June 1, 2007.
That decade-long gap says something about what was driving the numbers here specifically: the city carries more of the region's heavy industry and through-traffic than its neighbors. Newport News Shipbuilding, now part of Huntington Ingalls Industries, is Virginia's largest industrial employer with more than 26,000 workers building and overhauling nuclear aircraft carriers on the waterfront, and Interstate 64 and Interstate 664 both funnel Peninsula commuter and freight traffic past the same stretch of the James River.
Why summer is the season to watch
Newport News has a humid subtropical climate — hot, sticky summers and mild winters — with the James River and Hampton Roads harbor on three sides of the city keeping humidity high even when there's no rain in the forecast. That combination of heat, moisture, and light wind is exactly what turns vehicle and industrial exhaust into ground-level ozone instead of just letting it disperse.
At just 15 feet of elevation and surrounded by water, the peninsula doesn't get the kind of cleansing wind that scours pollution out of a valley. Still, muggy afternoons can let ozone build through the day before an evening sea breeze off the Bay finally clears it out — that's the pattern worth watching through the warm months, not a single smoky week.
The one time smoke did show up: June 2023
Newport News isn't a wildfire-smoke city the way California or the Pacific Northwest are, but it wasn't entirely spared during the extraordinary 2023 Canadian wildfire season. On June 2, 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in Nova Scotia pushed south and affected air quality across Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. — the same event that turned skies orange in New York and Philadelphia a few days later.
It was a genuine exception, not a preview of a new normal — Newport News doesn't sit downwind of a regular fire corridor the way inland Western cities do. But it's exactly the kind of out-of-nowhere event Canairy is built to catch: a plain-English alert when smoke drifts in from a thousand miles away, even on a day nothing in the local forecast would have warned you.
Newport News air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Newport News right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 9:19 AM EDT, the air quality in Newport News, Virginia is AQI 61 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 14.6 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Newport News get hazy or smoggy in summer?
Hot, humid, and calm summer afternoons let vehicle exhaust from I-64 and I-664 and emissions from the region's shipyards and port terminals cook into ground-level ozone. It's the same chemistry that got Newport News classified as a marginal ozone nonattainment area for years — the city only reached maintenance status for the older federal ozone standards in 2007.
Did wildfire smoke ever reach Newport News?
Yes, briefly. During the extraordinary Canadian wildfire season of 2023, smoke drifted as far south as Virginia and affected air quality here on June 2, 2023. It was a rare event, not a recurring pattern — Newport News's ongoing air quality story is summer ozone, not wildfire 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 Newport News, 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 Newport News
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