Air Quality in Parkersburg, West Virginia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Parkersburg — with free alerts the moment ozone climbs.
AQI 29 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Parkersburg, West Virginia is AQI 29 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 5.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 25 to 49. 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 Parkersburg: 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 Parkersburg and Vienna, Belpre, OH, Marietta, OH, Williamstown. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Parkersburg
The sensors Canairy reads in Parkersburg agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 24-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.2 mi W | 29 | Good |
| 1.7 mi NNW | 29 | Good |
| 2.1 mi NE | 25 | Good |
| 2.1 mi S | 49 | Good |
For most of the year, the air in Parkersburg settles into the good-to-moderate range typical of the Ohio Valley. The exception is summer: hot, humid, stagnant afternoons cook vehicle and industrial exhaust into ground-level ozone, and Wood County spent years on the EPA's ozone nonattainment list because of it. Add a Mid-Ohio Valley chemical industry that residents have watched closely since the Washington Works PFOA story broke, and it's easy to see why people here don't take the air for granted.
What Canairy does for Parkersburg
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Parkersburg: 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 Parkersburg or across the country, on one screen.
Summer ozone, not summer smoke, is Parkersburg's real air problem
Unlike much of the West, Parkersburg's worst air days don't come from wildfire smoke drifting in — they come from the ground up, on hot, still summer afternoons when sunlight bakes vehicle and industrial exhaust into ground-level ozone. The EPA designated the Parkersburg-Marietta area, covering Wood County, West Virginia and Washington County, Ohio, as nonattainment for the 1997 8-hour ozone standard in 2004, a formal acknowledgment that the valley's summer ozone was a real public-health problem, not a nuisance.
The area has since met the federal standard and is now on an EPA-approved maintenance plan that runs through 2027, but the underlying weather pattern hasn't changed. The American Lung Association's State of the Air report still ranks the Parkersburg-Marietta-Vienna metro around 125th out of 226 U.S. areas for high-ozone days — middling, not clean, and worth checking before a July afternoon outside.
The Washington Works plant shaped how this valley thinks about its air
Just across the Ohio River from Parkersburg, the Washington Works chemical plant has manufactured fluorochemicals since 1951, first under DuPont and now under Chemours. It's the plant at the center of the PFOA (C8) contamination story — the one attorney Robert Bilott spent decades litigating, and the subject of the film Dark Waters. Most of that story is about drinking water, but the same PFAS compounds have also been documented moving through the plant's air emissions and settling on the surrounding land, not just flowing downriver.
In 2025 a federal judge ordered Chemours to stop discharges exceeding its permit limits at Washington Works, an order an appeals court later paused. PFAS isn't part of the EPA's Air Quality Index and Canairy doesn't measure it — our sensors read PM2.5 and ozone, the pollutants the AQI actually covers. But the plant's history is a big reason Mid-Ohio Valley residents pay closer attention to what's coming out of local industry than people in a lot of other places do.
A river-valley climate that turns up the heat, not the smoke
Parkersburg sits at 633 feet elevation, right where the Little Kanawha River meets the Ohio, with Belpre and Marietta, Ohio directly across the water. It isn't the kind of steep mountain hollow that traps cold air in a winter inversion the way some West Virginia towns further into Appalachia are; the terrain here is river-valley rolling hills, not a bowl.
What the valley does deliver is heat and humidity — summer highs regularly near 90°F, a record of 104°F, and the kind of muggy, wind-still air that lets ozone and fine particles build up through a long afternoon instead of blowing through. That combination of heat, humidity, highway traffic, and a river valley full of legacy industry is the real reason to check the number before a summer outdoor plan, not a wildfire forecast.
Parkersburg air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Parkersburg right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Parkersburg, West Virginia is AQI 29 — Good — with PM2.5 at 5.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Parkersburg get ozone alerts in summer?
Ground-level ozone forms when sunlight bakes vehicle and industrial exhaust on hot, still days, and the Mid-Ohio Valley gets plenty of both. Wood County, West Virginia and Washington County, Ohio spent years on the EPA's ozone nonattainment list before meeting the federal standard, and the area still ranks in the middle of the pack nationally for high-ozone days. Summer afternoons, especially still, humid ones, are when it's worth checking your number before spending hours outside.
Does the Washington Works plant affect Parkersburg's air quality?
Washington Works, across the Ohio River near Parkersburg, is best known for PFOA (C8) contamination of local drinking water, and PFAS compounds have also been documented in air emissions from the site. PFAS isn't part of the EPA's Air Quality Index, though, and Canairy's readings track the pollutants the AQI actually measures - PM2.5 and ozone - not PFAS. The plant's history is a big part of why people in this valley watch their air and water closely.
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 Parkersburg, 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 Parkersburg
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