Air Quality in Norfolk, Virginia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Norfolk — with free alerts when summer ozone or drifting smoke pushes the air into unhealthy territory.
AQI 48 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Norfolk, Virginia is AQI 48 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 8.6 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 41 to 53. 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 Norfolk: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very high 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 Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Hampton. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Norfolk
The sensors Canairy reads in Norfolk are 12 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 0.4 mi SE | 41 | Good |
| 1.1 mi NW | 53 | Moderate |
| 1.4 mi SSW | 48 | Good |
| 2.4 mi NNW | 53 | Moderate |
| 4.3 mi WSW | 46 | Good |
Most of the year the air over Norfolk is unremarkable — this is a flat, coastal city with no wildfire risk of its own, and Hampton Roads has spent most of the past two decades meeting federal ozone standards. The season to actually watch runs roughly April through September, when hot, humid afternoons and heavy interstate traffic combine to cook up ground-level ozone. Then, in June 2023, a stranger event showed up: smoke from wildfires burning hundreds of miles north in Quebec drifted down the Atlantic seaboard and pushed Norfolk into a Code Red air quality alert, with the Eastern Shore hitting Code Purple, even though nothing was burning anywhere near Virginia.
What Canairy does for Norfolk
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Norfolk: 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 Norfolk or across the country, on one screen.
Norfolk's ozone season runs April through September
Hampton Roads spent years as an ozone nonattainment area under the federal 1997 eight-hour ozone standard before cleaning up enough for the EPA to redesignate the region to attainment in 2007. It went on to meet the tighter 2008 ozone standard by 2012, and Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality has kept the metro area — Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Hampton, and Newport News among them — under an EPA-approved maintenance plan ever since, most recently reaffirmed in a Federal Register rule published in October 2023.
What makes ozone the recurring worry here isn't one smokestack, it's heat, sunlight, and cars. Older regional planning documents warned that if Hampton Roads smog levels ran too high for even an hour in a summer, the area would face mandatory tailpipe testing and new business emission limits — which is why the region's air-quality plans have historically focused on traffic and tailpipe emissions through corridors like the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel rather than pointing at a single industrial source.
The Canadian wildfire smoke that reached Norfolk in June 2023
On back-to-back days in early June 2023, smoke from record wildfires burning hundreds of miles away in Quebec drifted down the Atlantic coast and settled over Hampton Roads. Local stations reported the sky turning hazy as the air quality index climbed from Code Orange to Code Red — the 151-200 'Unhealthy' band — while Northampton and Accomack counties on the Eastern Shore were pushed into Code Purple, 201-300, one of the worst readings the region had recorded. City officials advised people to limit outdoor exposure and keep windows closed, and local coverage noted that four hours outside in Code Red air carried roughly the same lung exposure as smoking a cigarette.
What made the event unusual is that Norfolk itself has essentially no wildfire risk — flat, wet, coastal Virginia does not burn. But 2023 showed that a fire thousands of miles north can still push the city's air into unhealthy territory for days, arriving as the kind of fine smoke particle that Norfolk's ozone-focused monitoring wasn't built to catch. It's why Canairy tracks particle sensors here as closely as ozone: the two pollutants have different seasons and different sources, and a page that only watches one of them misses the other.
The Port of Virginia and Naval Station Norfolk are the quieter sources
Norfolk sits on a harbor shared by the Port of Virginia and Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world, and both keep a constant stream of container ships, tugs, and drayage trucks moving past neighborhoods along the Elizabeth River. The port has run its Green Operator Program since 2006, offering rebates of up to $35,000 to replace or retrofit older diesel drayage trucks, and has helped replace or retrofit more than 400 of them so far.
In 2024 the port won $380 million from the EPA's Clean Ports Grant Program — the second-largest award in the country — to convert cargo-handling equipment to zero-emission electric power. That money is aimed squarely at diesel particulate matter, the fine soot that comes off ship engines and truck traffic near the terminals, which is a quieter, more constant contributor to Norfolk's air than the ozone spikes and imported wildfire smoke that make the news.
Norfolk air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Norfolk right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 8:34 PM EDT, the air quality in Norfolk, Virginia is AQI 48 — Good — with PM2.5 at 8.6 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did Norfolk get a Code Red air quality alert in 2023?
In June 2023, smoke from record wildfires burning hundreds of miles north in Quebec drifted down the Atlantic coast and settled over Hampton Roads, pushing Norfolk into a Code Red alert (AQI 151-200) while the Eastern Shore hit Code Purple (201-300). Norfolk has essentially no wildfire risk of its own — the smoke came entirely from Canada — which is why a fine-particle sensor network matters here even in a region that usually worries more about ozone.
When is ozone season in Hampton Roads?
Ground-level ozone is the region's main warm-weather concern, typically running from April through September when heat and sunlight react with vehicle exhaust. Hampton Roads was once a nonattainment area for ozone under the 1997 federal standard, was redesignated to attainment in 2007, met the tighter 2008 standard by 2012, and has stayed under an EPA-approved maintenance plan since, most recently reaffirmed in 2023.
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 Norfolk, 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 Norfolk
We watch Norfolk'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.