Air Quality in Paterson, New Jersey — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Paterson — with free alerts when summer ozone or highway pollution spikes.
AQI 10 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Paterson, New Jersey is AQI 10 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 1.9 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 10 to 12. 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 Paterson: 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 Paterson and Clifton, Hawthorne, Totowa, Fair Lawn. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Paterson
The sensors Canairy reads in Paterson agree right now — all 3 sit in the Good band, a 2-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.9 mi NNE | 10 | Good |
| 4.7 mi NE | 11 | Good |
| 5.0 mi NNE | 12 | Good |
Most days, Paterson's air doesn't make headlines. This isn't wildfire country, and the sky rarely turns orange. But Passaic County sits inside one of the country's most stubborn ozone-nonattainment zones, and on hot, still summer afternoons, exhaust from across the New York City metro cooks into smog that settles over the city. Add Interstate 80 running straight through town, and Paterson's real air-quality story is less about fire season and more about summer ozone and everyday traffic.
What Canairy does for Paterson
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Paterson: 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 Paterson or across the country, on one screen.
Paterson's air problem is ozone, not wildfire smoke
Passaic County is part of the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island ozone nonattainment area, one of the most persistent ground-level ozone problems in the country. EPA's Green Book classifies the area Severe-15 under the 2008 8-hour ozone standard — one of the worst categories on the books — and it is still rated Serious under the tighter 2015 standard. From roughly May through September, hot, sunny, low-wind days let vehicle and industrial exhaust from across the metro region react into smog that drifts over Paterson along with the rest of northern New Jersey.
Unlike wildfire smoke, ozone doesn't announce itself with a hazy or orange sky. The worst ozone days often look like perfectly clear, sunny summer afternoons, because strong sunlight and heat are exactly what the chemical reaction needs to run. That mismatch between how the day looks and what's actually in the air is a big part of why a plain-English reading matters more here than a glance out the window.
Interstate 80 runs straight through the city
Interstate 80 cuts directly through Paterson, and the Garden State Parkway passes just south of the city near Clifton, so a large share of Paterson's neighborhoods sit within a few blocks of a major diesel truck corridor. Traffic pollution — fine particles and nitrogen oxides — runs highest right along these routes and fades with distance, which is part of why one citywide number can miss a lot: a block near I-80 and a block near Great Falls a mile away can be breathing meaningfully different air on the same afternoon.
The Passaic River winds through the city and drops 77 feet at the Great Falls, the waterpower that built Paterson into the 19th-century mill town known as Silk City. Many of those old textile and machine-shop buildings still stand along the riverbanks, now part of Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park. The mills left some legacy contamination in the soil and river sediment, but the everyday air-quality story here in 2026 is traffic and regional ozone, not the old factories.
Paterson's kids carry a higher asthma burden than the rest of the state
City-level health data shows Paterson has markedly higher emergency-department visit rates for asthma than both Passaic County and New Jersey as a whole. Researchers looking at the gap have pointed to a mix of older housing stock, environmental exposures like traffic emissions, and barriers to routine asthma care, rather than any single cause — a place-based problem more than a single-source one.
The one real exception to Paterson's usual pattern came in June 2023, when smoke from Canadian wildfires gave New Jersey its worst air-quality day in 43 years. On June 7, fifteen monitoring sites statewide recorded PM2.5 above the federal 24-hour standard, and Newark and Paterson were both named among the northern New Jersey communities hit hardest as the sky turned orange and AQI readings reached hazardous levels. It was a one-off, not a seasonal pattern, but it showed how far smoke can travel and how fast a clear day can turn dangerous.
Paterson air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Paterson right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Paterson, New Jersey is AQI 10 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.9 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Paterson's air get worse in summer?
Passaic County sits inside the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island ozone nonattainment area, historically one of the most severe in the country under the Clean Air Act. On hot, sunny, windless days between May and September, vehicle and industrial exhaust from across the metro area reacts in the heat to form ground-level ozone, which tends to peak in the afternoon. Unlike smoke, ozone can be worst on days that look perfectly clear.
Does Interstate 80 affect Paterson's air quality?
Interstate 80 runs directly through Paterson, and neighborhoods closest to the highway see higher levels of traffic pollution — fine particles and nitrogen oxides — than areas just a few blocks away. That's part of why Canairy reads sensors block by block instead of relying on one citywide average.
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 3 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Paterson, 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 Paterson
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