Air Quality in Pawtucket, Rhode Island — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Pawtucket — with free alerts the moment ozone or fine particles climb into unhealthy territory.
AQI 9 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Pawtucket, Rhode Island is AQI 9 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 1.7 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 7 to 9. 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 Pawtucket: 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 Pawtucket and Central Falls, Providence, East Providence, Lincoln. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Pawtucket
The sensors Canairy reads in Pawtucket 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2.3 mi NNE | 7 | Good |
| 4.9 mi SSW | 9 | Good |
| 6.7 mi NE | 9 | Good |
Most of the year, Pawtucket's air is unremarkable in the best way — this old mill city on the Blackstone and Seekonk Rivers doesn't sit in a smoke-prone canyon or a wildfire-adjacent forest, and there's no valley here to trap anything. The real story is quieter and more constant: Pawtucket sits inside the I-95 corridor that runs through the most densely built, most traffic-heavy stretch of Rhode Island, and on hot, still summer days regional ozone can push the air into Moderate or worse right along with the rest of southern New England.
What Canairy does for Pawtucket
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Pawtucket: 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 Pawtucket or across the country, on one screen.
Pawtucket sits inside Rhode Island's I-95 pollution corridor
Interstate 95 cuts through the western edge of Pawtucket on its way between Providence and Central Falls, and the EPA has singled out this exact stretch for a community-scale air toxics study — the "Mobile95" monitoring project — because the neighborhoods it passes through have among the highest childhood asthma rates in the state. Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence, and Woonsocket were named together in EPA-funded research as the Rhode Island communities carrying the heaviest air-pollutant burden, largely traffic-related fine particles and nitrogen dioxide from the highway's daily flow of cars and diesel trucks.
That burden shows up in real programs, not just reports: in 2023, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Central Providence residents helped design a $1.38 million Medicaid-funded health initiative that included buying air filters for households dealing with asthma. It's a sign of how local this problem is — the air near an on-ramp or a truck route in Pawtucket can carry a noticeably heavier particle load than a reading from a single regional monitor would suggest.
Summer brings ozone, not smoke, most years
Rhode Island's Department of Environmental Management issues a daily air quality forecast through the warm months because ground-level ozone — the product of vehicle and industrial emissions cooking in sunlight and heat — is the state's recurring summer pollutant. On hot, sunny, light-wind afternoons, ozone can climb from Good into Moderate or Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups across the Providence area, Pawtucket included, and DEM will flag it a day ahead so people with asthma or lung disease can plan around it.
Pawtucket itself has no ridgeline or basin to trap that ozone in place the way inland California valleys do — at 39 feet of elevation on flat land near the head of Narragansett Bay, the air here generally moves through. But "moves through" isn't the same as "clean": ozone is a regional problem, cooked up across the whole Boston-to-New York corridor and drifting with the wind, so a still, hot day can bring Pawtucket the same smog affecting cities well outside Rhode Island.
Canadian wildfire smoke reached Pawtucket in June 2023
Pawtucket doesn't have a wildfire season of its own, but it isn't immune to smoke from somewhere else. In early June 2023, smoke from record wildfires burning in Quebec and Northern Ontario drifted south and settled over New England; EPA's regional office reported that Rhode Island, along with Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and Vermont, was exceeding federal standards for 24-hour particle pollution as skies turned an orange-grey haze. Rhode Island DEM issued an Air Quality Alert and health advisory that ran through July 1, warning that fine particles had reached Unhealthy levels late in the week and advising anyone with asthma, heart disease, or lung disease to stay indoors with windows shut.
It was a preview of a pattern that's become more common across the Northeast in recent fire seasons. For a city with no local fire risk, that's still the scenario worth having a plan for — the kind of day where the sky looks wrong even though nothing is burning anywhere nearby, and the only way to know how bad it really is happens to be a sensor, not your nose.
Pawtucket air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Pawtucket right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 6:14 PM EDT, the air quality in Pawtucket, Rhode Island is AQI 9 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.7 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Pawtucket's air get worse on hot summer days?
Ground-level ozone is Rhode Island's main summer pollutant. It forms when vehicle and industrial emissions react in strong sunlight and heat, and it builds up regionally across southern New England rather than staying put in one city. Rhode Island DEM issues a next-day ozone forecast through the warm months, and Pawtucket's stretch of the I-95 corridor adds its own share of the vehicle emissions that feed it.
Does wildfire smoke ever reach Pawtucket?
Yes, though it comes from hundreds of miles away rather than a local fire. In June 2023, smoke from record Canadian wildfires in Quebec and Northern Ontario pushed fine-particle pollution to Unhealthy levels across Rhode Island, prompting a state Air Quality Alert. It's an irregular event rather than a season, but it can turn a clear morning hazy with little warning.
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 Pawtucket, 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 Pawtucket
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