Air Quality in Wheeling, West Virginia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Wheeling — with free alerts the moment the air changes.
AQI 14 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Wheeling, West Virginia is AQI 14 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 10 to 23. 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 Wheeling: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a very 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 Wheeling and Moundsville, Wellsburg, Bridgeport, St. Clairsville. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Wheeling
The sensors Canairy reads in Wheeling agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 13-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 mi W | 12 | Good |
| 3.6 mi S | 18 | Good |
| 3.8 mi NNE | 14 | Good |
| 5.3 mi N | 10 | Good |
| 5.7 mi SSW | 23 | Good |
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.
What Canairy does for Wheeling
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Wheeling: 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 Wheeling or across the country, on one screen.
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?
As of September 14, 2026 at 8:09 AM EDT, the air quality in Wheeling, West Virginia is AQI 14 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
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 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 5 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Wheeling, 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 Wheeling
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