Air Quality in North Charleston, South Carolina — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across North Charleston — including the Neck's industrial corridor — with free alerts when the air changes.
AQI 58 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in North Charleston, South Carolina is AQI 58 — Moderate and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 13.0 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 53 to 68. 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 North Charleston: grass 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 North Charleston and Charleston, Hanahan, Goose Creek, Summerville. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in North Charleston
The sensors Canairy reads in North Charleston agree right now — all 4 sit in the Moderate band, a 15-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 mi E | 57 | Moderate |
| 2.2 mi ESE | 60 | Moderate |
| 2.3 mi E | 53 | Moderate |
| 4.3 mi NE | 68 | Moderate |
For most of North Charleston, air quality is unremarkable in the best way — this is coastal Lowcountry, not a smoke-prone canyon or a smog-choked basin. But drive into the Neck, the industrial corridor squeezed between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers where Rosemont, Union Heights, and Chicora-Cherokee sit beside a working chemical plant, the port, and the rail lines that feed it, and the story changes. Those neighborhoods have spent decades living next to industry that occasionally spills into the air they breathe.
What Canairy does for North Charleston
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for North Charleston: 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 North Charleston or across the country, on one screen.
The Neck's chemical plant has a long, documented history
The Lanxess plant on King Street Extension, right next to Rosemont, has a history residents haven't been allowed to forget. On June 17, 1991, an explosion at the site — then owned by Albright & Wilson — killed nine workers and injured dozens. The plant has kept having incidents since: a 2019 phosphorous leak forced a shelter-in-place order and briefly shut down I-26, and in 2023 two more leaks followed, including a roughly 10-pound phosphorus release on June 21 that sent the surrounding blocks back indoors.
During that June 2023 release, a light wind carried the plume over Rosemont for about two hours, and one of the neighborhood's own PurpleAir monitors read an AQI of 167 — Unhealthy — before it cleared. Nancy Button, president of the Rosemont Neighborhood Council and a 70-year resident, has pushed the state's environmental agency and the company for years to spell out exactly what residents are being exposed to. The plant has since cut its ethylene oxide emissions by roughly 80% since 2019 under new federal controls, but Rosemont keeps watching.
Port traffic, rail yards, and I-26 add diesel to the same corridor
Rosemont's other neighbor is the South Carolina Ports Authority terminal — the reason the state's transportation department built a 1,500-foot sound barrier along an alternate I-26 route rather than send an off-ramp straight through the neighborhood. That same few square miles carries the container trucks, Norfolk Southern and CSX rail traffic, and interstate exhaust that come with a major East Coast port, stacked on top of whatever the chemical plant is putting out.
It's that combination — industry, rail, and diesel truck traffic concentrated in one place — that led the Lowcountry Alliance for Model Communities and the Medical University of South Carolina's Department of Public Health Sciences to build a community air-monitoring network, placing PurpleAir sensors specifically in Rosemont, Union Heights, Accabee, Liberty Hill, and Chicora-Cherokee. Canairy reads that same kind of sensor data, block by block, rather than leaning on a single number for a city that covers 81 square miles.
One number can't describe a city this spread out
North Charleston runs from the industrial Neck near downtown Charleston all the way up to Ashley Phosphate Road and the Boeing plant and airport near the Dorchester County line — neighborhoods that have nothing to do with the chemical corridor and, most days, breathe genuinely clean coastal air off the Ashley and Cooper Rivers.
That's why a single citywide AQI reading is close to meaningless here: a family near the port and the Lanxess plant can be watching very different air than a family off Ashley Phosphate Road ten miles north. Canairy pulls from the sensors nearest the places you've actually saved, not one monitor standing in for the whole city.
North Charleston air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in North Charleston right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:24 AM EDT, the air quality in North Charleston, South Carolina is AQI 58 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 13.0 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does the Neck neighborhood near Rosemont see worse air quality spikes?
Rosemont and neighboring Union Heights and Chicora-Cherokee sit next to both a working chemical plant and the South Carolina Ports Authority terminal, with the truck, rail, and highway traffic that comes with a major port stacked on top. A 2023 phosphorus release from the plant pushed a nearby PurpleAir sensor to an AQI of 167 before it cleared, and residents have pressed the state's environmental agency for years to explain what they're breathing.
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 North Charleston, 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 North Charleston
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