Air Quality in Springdale, Arkansas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Springdale — with free alerts when summer ozone or drifting smoke push the air past healthy.
AQI 35 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Springdale, Arkansas is AQI 35 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 6.3 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. 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 Springdale: weeds 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 Springdale and Fayetteville, Rogers, Bentonville, Lowell. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Springdale's air is good on most days, and its two best-known local air stories don't actually overlap much. One is a nuisance: as the headquarters of Tyson Foods and the officially declared "Poultry Capital of the World," the city carries a smell reputation that has little to do with the numbers Canairy tracks. The other is real: ground-level ozone, which builds up on hot, still summer afternoons as one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country adds more cars to Interstate 49 every year. Washington County earned a D grade for high ozone days in the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report, even though its year-round particle pollution graded out at an A.
What Canairy does for Springdale
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Springdale: 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 Springdale or across the country, on one screen.
Northwest Arkansas is growing faster than its air can clear
The Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metro is one of the fastest-growing in the country, adding roughly 36 people a day and growing 2.4% between 2024 and 2025 alone — good for ninth in the nation in percentage growth. Most of that growth clusters along the I-49 corridor running straight through Springdale, and traffic has followed: daily counts on some stretches have climbed from roughly 30,000 to 40,000 vehicles over the past two decades, even after the interstate was widened from four lanes to six. More cars and trucks means more of the nitrogen oxides that cook into ozone on a hot, sunny, windless afternoon — exactly the kind of day Northwest Arkansas has plenty of from May through September.
That combination is why Washington County posted a D grade for high ozone days in the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report. It isn't just a report-card number: on October 4, 2024, the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment issued a Code Orange ozone advisory for Washington and Benton counties, warning that stagnant weather would keep ozone concentrations above the federal 8-hour standard through the weekend and urging residents to refuel cars and mow lawns before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m. to keep emissions down during the hours that turn exhaust into smog.
The smell you notice isn't always the pollution you should worry about
Springdale doesn't hide its identity: Tyson Foods' world headquarters sits on Berry Street downtown, and in 2013 then-Governor Mike Beebe formally recognized the city as "The Poultry Capital of the World." George's and Cargill Meat Solutions run major plants here too, and the industry is woven into the landscape around the city — chicken houses, processing plants, and the farmland that takes their litter as fertilizer.
That litter is spread on pastures as cheap fertilizer, mostly in spring and fall, and it's a genuine, if temporary, source of odor — locals describe smells that can linger for a couple of weeks each season and travel on the wind, sometimes carrying south into Fayetteville when the breeze is out of the north. It's worth knowing the difference: that smell is mostly ammonia and organic compounds, not the fine particles or ozone that drive the AQI number on this page. A bad-smelling day in Springdale isn't automatically a bad-air day — but Canairy's sensors will tell you if it actually is one.
Wildfire smoke and desert dust still find their way here
Springdale sits on the Springfield Plateau of the Ozarks at about 1,335 feet — open, rolling upland rather than the enclosed valley that traps smoke over a lot of Western cities, so Springdale doesn't get the weeks-long smoke sieges that places like California wine country deal with. But it isn't immune to smoke from far away. In the third week of July 2026, Arkansas environmental officials tracked residual smoke drifting down from wildfires burning in Canada, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, layered on top of a seasonal plume of Saharan dust that rides the same summer wind pattern into the southeastern U.S. most years between late June and August.
Neither event pushed Springdale into unhealthy territory in 2026, but both are a reminder that a clear sky here doesn't guarantee clean air — a wildfire hundreds or thousands of miles away, or dust that crossed an ocean, can still nudge the numbers on an otherwise still summer day. That's the kind of shift that's easy to miss by eye and easy for a sensor to catch.
Springdale air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Springdale right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:08 AM CDT, the air quality in Springdale, Arkansas is AQI 35 — Good — with PM2.5 at 6.3 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Springdale's air quality get worse in summer?
Northwest Arkansas is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, and more traffic on corridors like Interstate 49 means more of the nitrogen oxides that cook into ground-level ozone on hot, still, sunny days. Washington County earned a D grade for high ozone days in the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report, and the state issued a Code Orange ozone advisory for the county as recently as October 2024.
Does the smell from Springdale's poultry plants mean the air is unhealthy?
Not necessarily. Springdale is home to Tyson Foods' world headquarters and was formally named "The Poultry Capital of the World" in 2013, and the odor from processing plants and poultry litter spread as fertilizer — mostly in spring and fall — is a real nuisance that can carry for miles on the wind. But that smell is largely ammonia and organic compounds, not the fine particles or ozone the AQI measures, so a smelly day and an unhealthy-air day aren't the same thing. Canairy's sensors tell you which one you're actually having.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Springdale, 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 Springdale
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