Air Quality in Tuscaloosa, Alabama — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Tuscaloosa — with plain-English alerts when ozone builds or spring burn smoke rolls in.
AQI 48 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Tuscaloosa, Alabama is AQI 48 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 8.7 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 Tuscaloosa: 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 Tuscaloosa and Northport, Cottondale, Moundville, Vance. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Tuscaloosa's air is good most of the year — this is the humid Deep South, not California wildfire country, and the city has no history of weeks-long smoke sieges. The two things that actually move the needle here are hot, still summer days that build ozone, and the cool-season prescribed burns that forestry crews set in the pine woods around the county every winter and spring, which can drift into town as haze and smoke for an afternoon at a time.
What Canairy does for Tuscaloosa
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Tuscaloosa: 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 Tuscaloosa or across the country, on one screen.
Spring burn season, not wildfire smoke, is the real story
On March 4, 2026, the U.S. Forest Service was running a prescribed burn in neighboring Hale County at the same time the Alabama Forestry Commission was fighting an active wildfire there, and the combined smoke drifted into Tuscaloosa County thick enough that officials fielded, in the words of local coverage, plenty of calls and messages from residents and warned drivers to slow down on smoky roads. Forestry Commission fire analyst Ethan Barrett confirmed both fires were burning at once, which is why the smoke was heavier than a routine burn day.
That kind of afternoon is closer to normal than exceptional for West Alabama. Forestry crews run cool-season prescribed burns across the region into late April to clear out dry leaves and brush before wildfire season heats up — work regional forester Brad Lang has described as making any future fire in a treated stand far less devastating. Crews time each burn around wind and humidity, but on a still day the smoke can settle low over roads and neighborhoods for a few hours before it clears.
Summer means heat and humidity, and Tuscaloosa still meets the ozone standard
Ground-level ozone forms on hot, sunny, windless days, and Tuscaloosa gets plenty of those between April and September, with average summer highs near 100 degrees. Even so, EPA Green Book records do not list Tuscaloosa County among Alabama's ozone or particle-pollution nonattainment areas — unlike Jefferson, Shelby, and Walker counties around Birmingham, which carry a history of both. Tuscaloosa has stayed under the federal ozone limit even through its hottest summers.
That countywide grade is still just one number. Ozone and fine particles build unevenly across a city this size — worse near traffic corridors and river industry, milder in outlying neighborhoods — so the reading that matters is the one closest to where you actually are, not a single monitor across town.
The Black Warrior River industrial corridor is Tuscaloosa's other real source
Nucor Steel Tuscaloosa runs a steel plate mill along the river and is the county's dominant industrial emitter, outweighing the next four biggest reporters — Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, Phifer Inc., Hunt Refining, and BFGoodrich — combined, according to EPA Toxics Release Inventory data. The plant's most recent reporting year logged roughly 8.7 million pounds of releases across 17 chemicals, and Nucor has continued to expand the site, including a 2023 announcement of a $280 million new mill stand.
Downriver, Hunt Refining Company has its own enforcement history: a 2007 settlement with the EPA required more than $48.5 million in new pollution controls and a $400,000 penalty after Clean Air Act violations at its Tuscaloosa refinery, a fix expected to cut over 1,250 tons of harmful emissions a year. These are regulated point sources, not a constant citywide haze, but they are why Canairy reads sensors near the river corridor instead of relying on one downtown reading.
Tuscaloosa air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Tuscaloosa right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:09 AM CDT, the air quality in Tuscaloosa, Alabama is AQI 48 — Good — with PM2.5 at 8.7 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Tuscaloosa get smoky in late winter and spring?
Forestry crews across West Alabama run prescribed burns from roughly December through late April to clear out brush and reduce wildfire risk, and smoke from those fires — or from an occasional wildfire burning alongside them, as happened in Hale County in March 2026 — can drift into Tuscaloosa and settle over roads for a few hours on a still day.
Does industry affect Tuscaloosa's air quality?
Tuscaloosa County is home to Nucor Steel's largest plate mill and Hunt Refining Company's oil refinery, both located along the Black Warrior River and both regulated under the Clean Air Act. Hunt Refining agreed to a multimillion-dollar pollution-control upgrade in 2007 after EPA violations. These are point sources the EPA and Alabama Department of Environmental Management track closely, rather than a constant citywide problem.
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 Tuscaloosa, 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 Tuscaloosa
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