Air Quality in Warwick, Rhode Island — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Warwick — with free alerts when ozone climbs or smoke rolls in off the bay.
AQI 47 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Warwick, Rhode Island is AQI 47 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 8.4 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 33 to 49. 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 Warwick: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a low 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 Warwick and Cranston, West Warwick, East Greenwich, North Kingstown. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Warwick
The sensors Canairy reads in Warwick agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 16-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.7 mi WSW | 49 | Good |
| 4.7 mi ENE | 44 | Good |
| 5.1 mi NNE | 33 | Good |
| 6.3 mi SW | 47 | Good |
Most of the year, Warwick's air is genuinely unremarkable in the best way. The city's entire eastern edge sits on the water — the Providence River along its northern boundary, and Greenwich Bay further south, framed by the Warwick Neck and Potowomut peninsulas before Narragansett Bay opens out toward the Atlantic — and the sea breeze that builds most summer afternoons tends to clear pollution out before it can settle. The exceptions are a handful of hot, humid days each summer when ground-level ozone climbs across southern New England, and the rare summer, like 2023, when wildfire smoke drifts down from Canada and turns the sky over the bay hazy for days at a stretch.
What Canairy does for Warwick
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Warwick: 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.
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Warwick sits on the water, and that mostly keeps its air quiet
Warwick's whole eastern edge is waterfront. The Providence River forms its northern boundary, and further south Greenwich Bay is framed by two peninsulas, Warwick Neck and Potowomut, before Narragansett Bay opens out toward the Atlantic. The city sits low — about 20 feet above sea level — and borders Cranston to the north, West Warwick to the west, and East Greenwich to the south. Rhode Island's own air-quality forecast splits the state into western, Providence, and coastal zones, and Warwick's bay-facing geography puts it with the coastal towns, where the afternoon sea breeze usually keeps ozone from building the way it can further inland.
That same geography also puts T.F. Green, Rhode Island's main airport, inside Warwick's own city limits — a distinction none of the state's other large cities share. Aircraft taking off and landing add real combustion exhaust over the neighborhoods under its flight paths, and a $30 million runway repaving project running into late 2026 has been shifting traffic onto the airport's shorter crosswind runway, concentrating both noise and exhaust over different streets than usual. Even so, the airport is a minor contributor next to the region's two bigger drivers: summer ozone and the occasional wildfire-smoke event from far outside Rhode Island.
Summer ozone is the more familiar problem
Ground-level ozone forms when sunlight cooks vehicle and industrial exhaust on hot, still days, and Rhode Island sits at the tail end of the Boston-to-Washington corridor, downwind of a lot of other places' pollution. Kent County, which Warwick anchors as the county seat, earned a B grade for ozone in the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report, covering 2022 through 2024 — a decent grade, but one that still reflects a handful of genuinely bad-air days most years rather than zero.
Washington County, just south along the same coastline, scored a C in the same report, a reminder that being near the water doesn't make a place immune to ozone — it just changes the odds. On the hot, hazy, low-wind days when the sea breeze fails to develop, Warwick's ozone can climb right along with the rest of southern New England, and that pattern is worth watching for far more than any single dramatic event.
June 2023: when Quebec's wildfires reached Narragansett Bay
Rhode Island doesn't usually deal with wildfire smoke, which is what made June 2023 stand out. Smoke from record wildfires burning near Quebec pushed south into New England, and the state's Department of Environmental Management issued back-to-back Air Quality Alerts for unhealthy fine particles on June 7 and again for a third straight day on June 9, urging residents to close their windows, avoid outdoor exertion, and consider N95 masks outdoors.
When DEM lifted the alert on the morning of June 9, it noted that southern Rhode Island — the part of the state that includes Warwick — had recorded the highest fine-particle readings before the plume finally moved offshore. A second, shorter round of Canadian smoke pushed alerts again on June 28 and 29. Neither event is the norm here, but both are a real example of why a place with generally good air still benefits from watching it, not assuming it.
Warwick air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Warwick right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Warwick, Rhode Island is AQI 47 — Good — with PM2.5 at 8.4 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did the sky turn hazy in Warwick during the summer of 2023?
Smoke from record wildfires burning near Quebec drifted down over southern New England for much of June 2023. Rhode Island's Department of Environmental Management issued back-to-back statewide Air Quality Alerts for unhealthy fine particles on June 7-9 and again on June 28-29, with southern Rhode Island — where Warwick sits — recording some of the highest readings before the plume finally moved offshore. It was one of the only times in recent memory that wildfire smoke, rather than local traffic or summer heat, drove the story here.
Does living near T.F. Green Airport affect the air I breathe?
Rhode Island's main airport sits inside Warwick's city limits, so residents under its flight paths deal with more aircraft exhaust and jet noise overhead than people in most other Rhode Island cities. It's a real, local combustion source, but it isn't what drives Warwick's worst air-quality days — summer ozone and the occasional wildfire-smoke event have a far bigger effect on the numbers than the airport does.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Warwick, 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 Warwick
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