Air Quality in Savannah, Georgia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Savannah — with a plain-English verdict on the ozone and humidity days that shape the coast's air now that the mill is gone.
AQI 70 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Savannah, Georgia is AQI 70 — Moderate and rising — with PM2.5 at 19.3 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 70 to 77. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.3 times 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 Savannah: grass 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 Savannah and Pooler, Tybee Island, Port Wentworth, Richmond Hill. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Savannah
The sensors Canairy reads in Savannah agree right now — all 3 sit in the Moderate band, a 7-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 mi S | 77 | Moderate |
| 2.8 mi SW | 70 | Moderate |
| 3.0 mi W | 70 | Moderate |
For most of the twentieth century, Savannah's air had a smell before it had a number. The International Paper mill on the Savannah River - built in the 1930s as Union Bag, later Union Camp - released enough sulfur dioxide that residents nicknamed the odor "the smell of money," since it also meant steady paychecks. A roughly $1 billion scrubber installed in the early 1990s cut most of that sulfur smell, and in August 2025 International Paper announced it was closing the Savannah mill for good, ending a nearly 90-year run. What's left day to day now is a much more ordinary coastal Georgia profile: hot, humid summer afternoons that can build ground-level ozone, and fine-particle readings that drift into Moderate territory on still days rather than the dramatic spikes some other Canairy cities see from wildfire smoke.
What Canairy does for Savannah
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Savannah: 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 Savannah or across the country, on one screen.
The mill that gave Savannah its smell, and its 2025 closure
Union Bag opened the mill on the Savannah River in the 1930s, and it grew into one of the largest kraft paper operations in the country under later owners Union Camp and International Paper. The kraft process released sulfur compounds strong enough that longtime residents could smell the mill for miles, a smell so familiar it earned the nickname "the smell of money" - bad for your nose, good for the paycheck, as the old joke went.
Union Camp spent close to $1 billion on a scrubber in the early 1990s that eliminated most of the sulfur dioxide, a change some credit with helping clear the way for Savannah's modern tourism boom. Then on August 21, 2025, International Paper announced it was closing the Savannah mill along with its Riceboro packaging plant, cutting about 1,100 jobs at facilities that had defined the local economy - and the local air - for nearly 90 years.
Port Wentworth's dust complaints didn't wait for the mill to close
Just northwest of downtown, in Port Wentworth, residents have reported a fine white dust settling on cars, siding, and yards for years, alongside sinus irritation, burning eyes, and coughing that they link to the mill site. Unlike the sulfur smell, which the scrubber mostly solved, the dust complaints kept surfacing well into the 2020s, prompting lab testing to identify exactly what was falling out of the air.
It's a reminder that a single citywide AQI number can miss a real, local problem: the dust and odor concentrated on one side of the river were never something a downtown Savannah reading would show. Canairy reads the sensors near the places you've actually saved, rather than one number for the whole metro.
Away from the mill, it's a Georgia Ports Authority and summer-humidity story
A few miles downriver, the Georgia Ports Authority's Garden City Terminal is one of the largest single container terminals in North America - the port was the third-busiest in the US by container volume as of 2021 - and keeps a steady flow of diesel trucks, cranes, and ships moving around the clock. That's the more ordinary source of particulate and nitrogen oxide pollution most port cities live with, separate from the mill's now-closed sulfur legacy.
The bigger everyday variable for most of Savannah is Chatham County's humid subtropical climate: average relative humidity runs from about 65% to nearly 80% year-round, and hot, stagnant summer afternoons are what build ground-level ozone. The state's Savannah air monitor has recently logged PM2.5 readings in the Moderate range on still days - nothing like a wildfire spike, but enough that Canairy's plain-English verdict is worth checking before an outdoor workout in August.
Savannah air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Savannah right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 11:24 AM EDT, the air quality in Savannah, Georgia is AQI 70 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 19.3 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why did Savannah stop smelling like a paper mill?
For decades, the International Paper mill (formerly Union Bag and Union Camp) on the Savannah River gave the city its "smell of money" - sulfur dioxide strong enough to notice for miles. A roughly $1 billion scrubber installed in the early 1990s eliminated most of that smell, and in August 2025 International Paper closed the Savannah mill entirely, ending an almost 90-year run and removing the city's biggest historical industrial air source.
Is the air near Port Wentworth still a concern?
Residents in Port Wentworth, next to the mill site, have reported fine white dust and symptoms like sinus irritation and burning eyes for years - a separate, longer-running issue from the sulfur smell that the scrubber addressed. Canairy's sensor map lets you check the reading closest to that specific neighborhood rather than relying on one citywide number.
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 Savannah, 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 Savannah
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