Air Quality in Sioux City, Iowa — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Sioux City — with free alerts the moment the air near you turns bad.
AQI 14 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Sioux City, Iowa is AQI 14 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.6 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 8 to 43. 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 Sioux City: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very 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 Sioux City and Sergeant Bluff, South Sioux City, NE, Dakota Dunes, SD, Le Mars. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Sioux City
The sensors Canairy reads in Sioux City agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 35-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.4 mi NW | 16 | Good |
| 0.4 mi NW | 12 | Good |
| 0.6 mi WNW | 43 | Good |
| 1.7 mi WNW | 23 | Good |
| 2.9 mi N | 8 | Good |
Sioux City's air isn't a wildfire story — it's an industrial one. The city grew up around meatpacking, and its worst air days trace back to the plants, rail yards, and truck routes clustered along the Missouri River bottoms rather than to smoke drifting in from somewhere else. Most days the air reads fine on a citywide average, but that average can hide real spikes in the neighborhoods closest to the industrial district.
What Canairy does for Sioux City
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Sioux City: 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 Sioux City or across the country, on one screen.
The meatpacking district is the reason Sioux City has an air problem
Sioux City's economy runs on hog and cattle processing — Tyson Fresh Meats and Seaboard Triumph Foods together employ thousands of people at plants clustered south of downtown along the Missouri River. That concentration of heavy processing is also the city's biggest air-quality liability. Iowa's Department of Natural Resources fined Seaboard Triumph Foods $7,000 in March 2025 for 1,920 hours of air-quality violations, after the plant's biogas flaring system repeatedly released hydrogen sulfide above its permitted limit — a February 2024 reading hit 12,089 parts per million, more than three times the 4,000 ppm cap.
DNR records show the company had been out of compliance since at least 2018, missing required monitoring equipment and failing to keep the records that would have caught the problem sooner. It's the kind of slow-moving industrial issue that doesn't make headlines the way a wildfire does, but for people living and working near the plant, it shows up as a persistent, foul-smelling gas that state regulators only formally penalized years after it started.
A grassroots sensor network found spikes the state's own monitors were missing
In summer 2025 the Iowa Environmental Council placed six PurpleAir monitors around Woodbury County, with two inside Sioux City on Geneva Street and Market Street — both areas the group flagged for already-high rates of asthma and respiratory illness. Around July 14, 2025, those monitors averaged PM2.5 readings of 153 to 154, well into the range that's unhealthy for sensitive groups, in neighborhoods within a few miles of the meatpacking district, area concrete plants, and coal-fired generation.
The council's broader finding was arguably more telling than any single spike: Woodbury County's air pollution rose about 15% over the prior decade, while similarly sized Iowa counties with just as much or more industry — Linn and Polk — showed no comparable increase. Iowa's official monitoring network is sparse enough that this kind of neighborhood-level spike had gone largely undocumented until residents started running their own sensors.
The valley and the tri-state traffic corridor add to the mix
Sioux City sits at the bottom of the Missouri River valley, pinned between the loess bluffs to the east and the river itself, at the point where Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota meet. That low, flat river-bottom setting is exactly where the meatpacking plants, rail yards, and grain and fertilizer handling facilities were built, and it's also where the interstate routes — I-29 running north-south and I-129 crossing into Nebraska — funnel a steady stream of truck traffic serving that same industry.
On calm days, the valley floor doesn't clear pollutants the way open, breezy terrain would, so emissions from the processing plants and the truck corridor that serves them tend to settle rather than disperse. It's a different mechanism than the West Coast's fire-driven smoke events, but the practical effect for anyone living in Riverside, the Bridgeport neighborhoods, or the areas closest to the stockyards is the same: air quality that can swing worse than the citywide number suggests.
Sioux City air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Sioux City right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:10 AM CDT, the air quality in Sioux City, Iowa is AQI 14 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.6 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Sioux City have air quality problems?
Unlike many Canairy cities, Sioux City's air issues aren't about wildfire smoke — they trace back to the meatpacking district south of downtown. Iowa's DNR fined Seaboard Triumph Foods in March 2025 for nearly 2,000 hours of air-quality violations tied to hydrogen sulfide releases, and a 2025 Iowa Environmental Council sensor network recorded PM2.5 spikes above 150 in neighborhoods near the plants, concrete facilities, and coal-fired generation.
Is Woodbury County's air pollution actually getting worse?
According to Iowa Environmental Council monitoring, Woodbury County's air pollution rose roughly 15% over the past decade, while similarly sized Iowa counties like Linn and Polk — with comparable or greater industry — did not see the same increase. That's part of why local advocates pushed for the additional PurpleAir sensors placed around Sioux City in 2025.
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 Sioux City, 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 Sioux City
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