Air Quality in Wheeling, West Virginia — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Wheeling — with free alerts the moment the air changes.

Live Wheeling AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Wheeling and Moundsville, Wellsburg, Bridgeport, St. Clairsville.

Wheeling's air is good most days, but the Ohio River valley the city sits in has a real track record: federal regulators classified Marshall, Ohio, and Belmont counties as failing the annual fine-particle standard as recently as 2013, on the strength of a century of steel and coke-plant emissions, and the same hills that give the town its scenery can trap exhaust and wood smoke on cold, still nights.

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.

Wheeling spent decades failing federal air quality standards

For most of the 20th century, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel's mills lined the Ohio River through Wheeling and the towns just across it in Ohio, including the Steubenville North works and the Mingo Junction plant made famous by The Deer Hunter. A coke plant at Follansbee, just up the river — Mountain State Carbon — kept turning coal into fuel for the blast furnaces long after most of the mills themselves had gone quiet.

The EPA designated the Wheeling, WV-OH area, covering Marshall County and Ohio County in West Virginia and Belmont County in Ohio, as nonattainment for the 1997 annual PM2.5 standard. It took until September 2013 for the EPA to approve West Virginia's request to redesignate the region to attainment. Mountain State Carbon itself didn't close until the second quarter of 2022, when owner Cleveland-Cliffs shut it down as part of a company-wide push to cut coke use and CO2 emissions — closing out one of the last direct links between Wheeling's air and its steelmaking past.

The valley itself holds smoke and haze in place

Wheeling sits in a narrow gorge cut by the Ohio River, hemmed in by the hills of the Western Allegheny Plateau, with elevations inside city limits ranging from 686 to 1,299 feet. That terrain does to Wheeling what it does across the wider upper Ohio Valley: on cold, clear nights a temperature inversion can cap the valley, holding vehicle exhaust and wood smoke close to the ground until wind or sunshine breaks it up. It's the same valley-and-hills setup that turned a 1948 inversion 30 miles upriver in Donora, Pennsylvania into one of the deadliest air pollution events in US history.

A couple of real point sources still sit close by. The AEP-owned Mitchell power plant, two 816-megawatt coal units built in 1971, runs south of Moundsville in Marshall County. Marshall County is also one of the most heavily drilled counties in the Marcellus and Utica shale gas fields, and compressor stations like Majorsville and Dry Ridge run around the clock moving gas out of the valley. None of that adds up to routine bad air today, but it means Wheeling's numbers can move on days when the wind and the valley both work against it.

Even Wheeling got a taste of Canadian wildfire smoke in 2023

In late June 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in Quebec and British Columbia settled over the upper Ohio Valley in what the National Weather Service office in Pittsburgh called a "double whammy," pushing Wheeling's air into the unhealthy range for a stretch of days. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Health and Human Resources issued a statewide fine-particle advisory and banned outdoor burning while the smoke sat over the region.

It was a preview of what much of the eastern half of the country now checks for every summer: a fire a thousand miles away can decide whether Wheeling's air is fine to breathe that day. Combined with the valley's tendency to trap whatever's already in it, that's the real argument for watching sensor readings instead of the sky — by the time smoke is visible from your porch, the fine particles have usually already had hours to build up.

Wheeling air quality FAQ

What is the air quality in Wheeling right now?

This page shows the current AQI for Wheeling, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood.

Why did Wheeling used to have such bad air quality?

For most of the 20th century, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel's mills and the Mountain State Carbon coke plant in nearby Follansbee kept fine-particle pollution high enough that the EPA designated Marshall, Ohio, and Belmont counties as nonattainment for the annual PM2.5 standard. The region wasn't redesignated to attainment until 2013, and the coke plant itself didn't close until 2022.

Does wildfire smoke ever reach Wheeling?

Yes, on occasion. In late June 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in Quebec and British Columbia settled over the upper Ohio Valley and pushed Wheeling's air into the unhealthy range, prompting a statewide fine-particle advisory and a ban on outdoor burning. It isn't an annual certainty the way it is out west, but it can happen when a big enough fire lines up with the wind.

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.

Where does Canairy's Wheeling data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Wheeling and surrounding towns, cross-referenced with government monitors and the Google Air Quality API. You can see every sensor behind your numbers on the live map - there's no black box.

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.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.