Air Quality in Owensboro, Kentucky — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Owensboro — with free alerts when summer ozone or drifting smoke pushes the air past healthy.
AQI 15 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Owensboro, Kentucky is AQI 15 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.7 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. 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 Owensboro: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a 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 Owensboro and Whitesville, Lewisport, Livermore, Calhoun. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Owensboro sits in a bend of the Ohio River in western Kentucky, and most days its air is simply fine. Daviess County has never been one of the Kentucky counties the EPA lists as failing to meet the federal ozone standard - unlike Jefferson, Bullitt, and Oldham counties around Louisville, two hours east. The exceptions come on muggy, windless summer afternoons when heat and humidity cook up ground-level ozone along the river valley, and in the rare year when wildfire smoke drifts down from hundreds of miles away, as it did in June 2023.
What Canairy does for Owensboro
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Owensboro: 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 Owensboro or across the country, on one screen.
Owensboro shut down its coal plant in 2020
For decades, Owensboro Municipal Utilities burned coal at the Elmer Smith Generating Station on Highway 144, just west of downtown - Unit 1 came online in 1964, Unit 2 followed in 1974, and together they supplied power to the city for over half a century. Facing an estimated $37 million bill to meet updated federal environmental rules, and with coal no longer the cheapest way to keep the lights on, OMU burned its last load of coal there in 2020 and switched to buying power from Henderson-based Big River Electric instead.
The plant's cooling towers, long a landmark on the Owensboro skyline, came down in December 2022. But the site isn't finished with its cleanup: OMU still files annual groundwater monitoring reports on the old coal ash ponds, a reminder that a retired plant's environmental footprint outlasts its smokestacks by years.
The real local factors are farm dust and summer ozone, not wildfire smoke
Daviess County is serious farm country - about 974 farms work roughly 271,000 acres here, and the county ranks among Kentucky's top producers of both soybeans and corn. Spring planting in April and May and fall harvest in September and October kick up fine dust over the fields ringing the city, a seasonal bump that shows up on sensors even though it rarely pushes the citywide reading past Moderate.
The bigger factor most summers is ozone. Owensboro's humid subtropical climate means hot, hazy, still afternoons are routine from June through August, and that combination - heat, sunlight, and stagnant air in the river valley - is exactly what turns car and truck exhaust into ground-level ozone. Because Daviess County sits outside the EPA's nonattainment zones, most of those days stay in the Moderate range rather than crossing into Unhealthy, but anyone with asthma will still notice the difference between a June morning and a July afternoon.
Canadian wildfire smoke reached even this far south in 2023
Owensboro doesn't have a wildfire season of its own, but in June 2023 it got a preview of what other regions deal with every year. Smoke from wildfires burning across Ontario and Quebec spread deep into the US Midwest, and reporting at the time noted Kentucky was the furthest south significantly affected, with skies turning hazy over Owensboro, Louisville, and Evansville alike.
That kind of event is still rare here - most years pass without any smoke worth mentioning - but it showed that a fire a thousand miles away can matter more to your lungs on a given week than anything happening locally. Canairy's alerts don't care where the particles started; if the sensors near your home show the air has turned bad, you'll hear about it whether the cause is a farm field, a July afternoon, or a fire in another country.
Owensboro air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Owensboro right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 8:08 AM EDT, the air quality in Owensboro, Kentucky is AQI 15 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.7 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Does Owensboro still have air pollution from its old coal plant?
The Elmer Smith Generating Station stopped burning coal in 2020 and its cooling towers were demolished in 2022, so it's no longer an active source of smoke or emissions. Owensboro Municipal Utilities still monitors groundwater around the retired plant's old coal ash ponds, but the day-to-day air quality story in Owensboro today is mostly about summer ozone and seasonal farm dust, not the old plant.
Why does Owensboro's air get hazy in summer?
Hot, humid, still afternoons are common in Owensboro from June through August, and that combination of heat, sunlight, and stagnant air over the Ohio River valley is what forms ground-level ozone from vehicle exhaust and other emissions. Daviess County isn't in an EPA ozone nonattainment area, so most of these days stay Moderate rather than Unhealthy, but the difference is still noticeable if you have asthma or are exercising outdoors.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Owensboro, 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 Owensboro
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