Air Quality in Richmond, Virginia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Richmond — with free alerts when ozone or wildfire smoke pushes the air past healthy.
AQI 53 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Richmond, Virginia is AQI 53 — Moderate and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 10.1 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 44 to 53. 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 Richmond: 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 Richmond and Henrico, Chesterfield, Hopewell, Petersburg. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Richmond
The sensors Canairy reads in Richmond are 9 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 mi NW | 52 | Moderate |
| 3.0 mi ESE | 44 | Good |
| 3.2 mi WSW | 53 | Moderate |
| 3.9 mi NNW | 52 | Moderate |
| 4.2 mi S | 53 | Moderate |
Richmond's air is good most of the year — this is a humid, green city on the James River, not an industrial basin, and there's no chronic smog problem hanging over it day to day. The exception that actually put Richmond in the news was June 2023, when smoke from wildfires burning hundreds of miles away in Canada drifted down and pushed the city into conditions nobody here had planned for.
What Canairy does for Richmond
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Richmond: 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 Richmond or across the country, on one screen.
Richmond's worst air day in memory wasn't local at all
On June 8, 2023, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management placed Richmond's air quality in its 'Red Zone' as smoke from wildfires burning across Quebec and Ontario settled over the city. AQI readings hit around 180 downtown and in parts of Chesterfield County, and climbed toward 200 in Henrico County — compared with the high 40s on the same date a year earlier. University of Richmond environmental scientist Todd Lookingbill put the jump in plain terms at the time: once you're over 150, he said, that's when it moves into an unhealthy condition for the general public.
The American Lung Association's own 2025 State of the Air report later pointed to that same event directly, noting that 2023 wildfire smoke was a factor in Richmond dropping from a B to a C grade for short-term particle pollution and sliding to 98th-worst in the country for it. That's the pattern worth knowing here: Richmond's day-to-day air is genuinely fine, but a fire thousands of miles away can still turn a clear Thursday into a red-zone Thursday by dinnertime.
Summer heat at the fall line brings its own ozone problem
Richmond sits right at the James River's fall line, where the rolling Piedmont gives way to the flat Tidewater — a spot that also means hot, humid, often still summer air with little to push it out. Those are close to the ideal conditions for cooking vehicle exhaust and other emissions into ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in summer smog, on the stickiest afternoons.
It shows up in the numbers: the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report gave the Richmond metro a B for ozone, but noted the region's national ranking actually worsened, from 165th- to 143rd-worst for it. Traffic funneling through the I-95/I-64/I-295 interchange downtown is a steady contributor, and on the most windless July and August days, ozone — not smoke — is usually the reason behind a Richmond air quality alert.
A new gas plant near Dutch Gap is the region's next air-quality fight
In December 2025, Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality granted an air permit for Dominion Energy's Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center — a $1.47 billion, 944-megawatt gas-fired peaker plant proposed for southern Chesterfield County near the Dutch Gap conservation area, just south of Richmond. It's meant to add generating capacity alongside the site of the former coal-burning Chesterfield Power Station.
The permit didn't go through quietly: Appalachian Voices, the NAACP, and Mothers Out Front all opposed it, and a petition asking the State Corporation Commission to reconsider the project was still pending as of mid-December 2025. Whatever the outcome, it's a reminder that Richmond's air isn't only shaped by wildfire smoke drifting in from Canada or a hot, still July afternoon — permitting decisions a few miles south of downtown matter too.
Richmond air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Richmond right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 11:54 AM EDT, the air quality in Richmond, Virginia is AQI 53 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 10.1 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why did Richmond's air quality get so bad in June 2023?
Smoke from wildfires burning in Quebec and Ontario drifted south and settled over central Virginia, pushing Richmond's AQI to around 180 downtown and toward 200 in Henrico County on June 8, 2023 — compared with the high 40s on the same date a year before. Virginia's Department of Emergency Management classified it a 'Red Zone' day, and the American Lung Association later cited that smoke as a factor in Richmond's particle-pollution grade slipping from a B to a C.
Why does Richmond get ozone alerts in summer?
Richmond sits at the James River's fall line in the Piedmont, where hot, humid, often still summer afternoons let vehicle exhaust and other emissions cook into ground-level ozone instead of blowing through. The American Lung Association's 2026 report gave the metro a B for ozone but noted its national ranking actually worsened year over year, and traffic through the I-95/I-64/I-295 interchange is a steady contributor on the worst days.
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 5 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Richmond, 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 Richmond
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