Air Quality in Vallejo, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Vallejo — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
Live Vallejo AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Vallejo and Benicia, American Canyon, Rodeo, Crockett.
Vallejo's air is shaped by water and industry, not by valley inversions. The city sits on San Pablo Bay with the Carquinez Strait along its southern edge, and the refineries, tank farms and freeway traffic packed around that strait are the things that change what people here breathe. The state has formally recognised the problem: Vallejo was nominated as a community under AB 617, California's 2017 community air protection law, and since September 2024 sensor-equipped cars have been driving the city block by block measuring ten pollutants, part of a two-year, $27 million mobile monitoring programme. The health picture behind that decision is blunt. South and Central Vallejo record 470.8 asthma emergency room visits per 10,000 people, more than three times the California rate.
Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.
The refineries are across the water, and the wind comes from there
Directly across the Carquinez Strait from Vallejo is the Phillips 66 refinery at Rodeo, long known as the San Francisco Refinery, together with the NuStar tank farm at Crockett. Vallejo's own community air monitoring plan describes those facilities plainly as upwind of the city, with emissions including sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and toxic gases that can blow into Vallejo and especially into its southern neighbourhoods. Residents have complained for years about strong odours and flare smoke during refinery upsets, and the plan records community reports of refinery odours accompanied by nausea, headache and chest pain. Phillips 66 has been converting the Rodeo plant to produce renewable diesel rather than refine crude, which is expected to reduce sulfur emissions over time, though flaring and combustion pollutants continue.
The next town east has its own refinery and its own record. In October 2024 the Bay Area Air District and the California Air Resources Board fined Valero Refining nearly $82 million over its Benicia refinery, the largest penalty in the district's history. Investigators found a hydrogen-system vent had released an estimated 8,400 tons of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, more than 360 times the legal limit, and that refinery management had known since at least 2003 without reporting it. Over $64 million of the settlement was directed to air quality and health projects in Benicia and surrounding communities. Valero began idling the refinery's processing units in February 2026 and is converting the site toward importing refined products, and in April 2026 the district fined it a further $3.25 million for 118 violations including exceeding particulate limits and a butane release. A refinery being shut down still flares.
Mare Island, the ferry terminal and Interstate 80
Mare Island Naval Shipyard operated until 1996 and left behind contaminated ground, including heavy metals and PCBs, that is still under remediation. Today the island hosts light industry, a ship repair yard and the ferry terminal, and residents in the St. Vincent Hill neighbourhood across the Mare Island Strait have identified it as a source of dust and diesel exhaust, some of it running late into the night. The San Francisco ferry service is good for congestion but currently runs on diesel, putting exhaust into the waterfront area. Vallejo also sits near the Selby Slag site just south across the water, a former lead smelter's slag disposal ground with high soil concentrations of heavy metals that can release dust if it is not managed.
Interstate 80 runs straight through the city carrying Bay Area to Sacramento truck traffic, and it is a significant local source of diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. The neighbourhoods along that corridor in West and North Vallejo carry more of it than the city average, as do the areas near State Route 37. Several census tracts here are designated SB 535 disadvantaged communities, including areas west of I-80, Mare Island, and tracts in northern Vallejo. This is exactly the kind of block-by-block variation that a single citywide number hides.
The strait is also the reason summer air here is usually decent
The same geography that delivers refinery plumes also delivers clean marine air. The Bay Area Air District's account of southwestern Solano County is that summer air quality generally benefits from marine air flowing in through the Carquinez Strait, which keeps ozone down; it is only when that marine flow is weak or absent that ozone climbs past health standards, on a handful of days a year and mainly further east. Winter is the harder season locally, with PM2.5 arriving from the Central Valley on easterly winds and adding to smoke from residential wood burning.
Wildfire smoke has become the other seasonal factor, with fires elsewhere in Northern California producing episodic spikes in fine particles here. For a city already carrying an asthma burden well above the state's, those spikes are the days that matter most, and they are also the days when a live local reading beats a regional forecast.
Vallejo air quality FAQ
Why is there smoke in Vallejo today?
If it comes with a smell — sulfur, solvent, something like tar — and you can see a flare from the south or east, it is most likely a refinery event. The Phillips 66 plant at Rodeo sits across the Carquinez Strait and is upwind of the city, and the Valero refinery at Benicia to the east has been flaring through its shutdown. If the haze is odourless, even across the whole sky and has been building for a day or more, it is more likely wildfire smoke from somewhere in Northern California. On a cold, still winter evening, low smoke close to the ground is usually residential wood burning. The sensor readings on this page will tell you whether the whole city is affected or just the neighbourhoods on one side of it.
What is the air quality in Vallejo right now?
This page shows the live AQI for Vallejo, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. Vallejo is a place where citywide averages are genuinely misleading — a plume off the strait can hit South Vallejo hard while the north end reads clean, and the I-80 corridor carries traffic pollution the rest of the city does not. That is the whole reason the state funded block-by-block mobile monitoring here. A sensor near your own street is the closest thing to an answer for you specifically.
Does the Benicia refinery closing mean cleaner air in Vallejo?
Over time, probably, but not immediately and not completely. Valero began idling the Benicia refinery's processing units in February 2026 and plans to convert the site into a hub for importing refined products, which removes a significant emissions source. But shutting down a refinery involves extensive flaring, and in April 2026 the Bay Area Air District fined the facility a further $3.25 million for 118 violations. Separately, the Phillips 66 refinery at Rodeo across the strait continues operating, converted to renewable diesel production. The direction is good; the transition period is not quiet.
Why does asthma come up so often in Vallejo?
Because the numbers are unusually bad. South and Central Vallejo record 470.8 asthma emergency room visits per 10,000 people, more than three times the California rate, and in Solano County the rate for Black residents is 625 per 10,000 against a statewide figure of 148. Around 19 percent of children and 19 percent of adults in the county had been diagnosed with asthma as of 2014, against roughly 15 and 14 percent statewide. That combination of a heavy asthma burden and a ring of industrial sources is why Vallejo was nominated for state community air monitoring in the first place.
What AQI level is unhealthy?
Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0–50 is Good and 51–100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions — and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.
Is Canairy free?
Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.
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