Air Quality in Virginia Beach, Virginia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Virginia Beach — with free alerts the moment summer ozone or drifting smoke moves in.
AQI 60 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Virginia Beach, Virginia is AQI 60 — Moderate and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 13.7 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 55 to 66. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
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 Virginia Beach: 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 Virginia Beach and Norfolk, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Hampton. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Virginia Beach
The sensors Canairy reads in Virginia Beach agree right now — all 3 sit in the Moderate band, a 11-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 3.5 mi NW | 66 | Moderate |
| 7.5 mi S | 55 | Moderate |
| 8.7 mi W | 60 | Moderate |
For most of the year, Virginia Beach's air is genuinely good — the same Atlantic breeze that fills the boardwalk keeps particle pollution and ozone from building up the way they do in landlocked cities. The exception is summer: April through September is Virginia's official ozone season, and on hot, hazy, low-wind days the heat, humidity, and vehicle and industrial exhaust drifting over from the rest of Hampton Roads can push the local AQI into Moderate or worse. A rarer but real second story showed up in June 2023, when smoke from wildfires burning more than a thousand miles away in Quebec and Nova Scotia drifted down the East Coast and put Hampton Roads under a Code Red air quality alert.
What Canairy does for Virginia Beach
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Virginia Beach: 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
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Ozone season runs April through September
Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality defines an official ozone season running from April 1 through September 30, and Hampton Roads — the metro area that includes Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, and Portsmouth — is one of the areas DEQ watches most closely for it. The region was designated nonattainment for the 1997 federal 8-hour ozone standard with a 'marginal' classification, and has since improved enough to be redesignated to maintenance status. That history is why DEQ still issues Code Orange, and occasionally Code Red, ozone action day alerts here on hot, still summer afternoons, warning that the air may be unhealthy for kids, older adults, and people with asthma.
Ground-level ozone doesn't come from a single smokestack; it forms when sunlight cooks vehicle and industrial exhaust in still, hot air. Virginia Beach sits at the eastern edge of a metro area with real emission sources — Naval Station Norfolk, the Portsmouth and Newport News shipyards, the coal export terminals along the Elizabeth River, and the traffic that funnels through the region's bridge-tunnels — and on light southwest-wind days that exhaust can drift out toward the oceanfront before the afternoon sea breeze clears it. That's the pattern locals learn: the muggiest, stillest days in July and August are the ones worth checking the number before an afternoon at the beach or a run on the boardwalk.
The ocean is usually the reason the air here is easy
Virginia Beach sits on a nearly flat coastal plain — the average elevation across the city is about 12 feet — with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Chesapeake Bay just to the north. That geography means there's rarely anything around to trap pollution the way a mountain valley does: a steady onshore breeze off the ocean is the default condition for much of the year, and it's a big part of why Virginia Beach's air runs cleaner on average than more inland parts of Hampton Roads.
The catch is that the same flat, open geography offers little shelter when the wind pattern flips. On summer days when the wind comes from the west or southwest instead of off the water, the sea breeze that usually flushes the area doesn't kick in until afternoon, giving ozone and fine particles a longer window to build up over the oceanfront and the neighborhoods west of it, like Kempsville and Pungo. It's also why Virginia Beach's air can look identical to Norfolk's on paper but feel different block to block, depending on which side of the wind shift a neighborhood sits on that day.
Why Canadian wildfire smoke reached the Virginia coast in 2023
Virginia Beach doesn't have a local wildfire season the way California or the Pacific Northwest do — the humid subtropical climate here just doesn't produce that kind of fire risk. But in early June 2023, smoke from an unusually intense wildfire outbreak in Quebec and Nova Scotia rode a steady flow of air all the way down the East Coast. Hampton Roads went from a Code Orange ozone-season alert to a Code Red air quality alert within about a day, with Virginia's Eastern Shore briefly hitting Code Purple, before conditions eased back to Code Yellow by the weekend.
It was a reminder that a city doesn't need its own fire risk to end up breathing wildfire smoke — that plume traveled well over a thousand miles and settled over a coastline that almost never sees anything like it. That kind of long-range smoke event is rare here, more like once every several years than an annual season, but when it happens it can arrive with little local warning, which is exactly the kind of shift a sensor network catches before the sky visibly changes.
Virginia Beach air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Virginia Beach right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:00 AM EDT, the air quality in Virginia Beach, Virginia is AQI 60 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 13.7 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Virginia Beach's air get worse in summer?
April through September is Virginia's official ozone season, and Hampton Roads — including Virginia Beach — is one of the areas the state watches most closely for it. On hot, still, humid days, sunlight reacts with vehicle and industrial exhaust from around the metro area to form ground-level ozone, and the state's Department of Environmental Quality issues Code Orange or Code Red ozone action day alerts when levels climb.
Does wildfire smoke ever reach Virginia Beach?
It's rare, but it happened in June 2023, when smoke from wildfires burning in Quebec and Nova Scotia traveled down the East Coast and pushed Hampton Roads from a Code Orange to a Code Red air quality alert within about a day. Virginia Beach doesn't have a local wildfire season, so long-range smoke events like that one are the exception rather than a yearly pattern.
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 Virginia Beach, 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 Virginia Beach
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