Air Quality in Yonkers, New York — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Yonkers — with free alerts when ozone season or wildfire smoke moves in.
AQI 8 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Yonkers, New York is AQI 8 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 1.5 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 8 to 11. 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 Yonkers: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a high 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 Yonkers and Mount Vernon, Hastings-on-Hudson, Bronxville, Tuckahoe. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Yonkers
The sensors Canairy reads in Yonkers agree right now — all 3 sit in the Good band, a 3-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 4.4 mi NE | 8 | Good |
| 4.9 mi SSW | 8 | Good |
| 5.8 mi ENE | 11 | Good |
Yonkers sits inside one of the most persistent ozone problem areas in the country. The EPA reclassified the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island region, which includes Westchester County, from Moderate to Serious nonattainment for the 2015 ozone standard, and most summer afternoons here are shaped by that fact. The rest of the year the air is unremarkable, but hot, still days between April and September, and the occasional wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada, are when it actually matters.
What Canairy does for Yonkers
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Yonkers: 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 Yonkers or across the country, on one screen.
Yonkers shares the region's 'Serious' ozone problem
In 2022 the EPA granted a request from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to reclassify the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island ozone nonattainment area from Moderate to Serious under the 2015 8-hour ozone standard, one of the strictest classifications in the federal system. Westchester County, and Yonkers within it, falls inside that boundary. New York State's own ozone season runs April through September, and the worst days are hot, sunny, and nearly windless — exactly the conditions that cook vehicle exhaust into ground-level ozone.
Yonkers sits at a genuine highway chokepoint for the lower Hudson Valley: the New York State Thruway (I-87), the Major Deegan Expressway feeding up from the Bronx, the Saw Mill River Parkway, the Cross County Parkway, and the Bronx River Parkway all pass through or along the city. That volume of commuter and truck traffic, combined with pollution that drifts up the Hudson corridor from New York City and northern New Jersey, is the main reason Yonkers' ozone readings climb on summer afternoons even when there is no fire or factory anywhere nearby.
The sky over Yonkers turned orange in June 2023
On June 6 through 8, 2023, smoke from wildfires in Quebec travelled roughly 600 miles south and gave New York City and the lower Hudson Valley, Yonkers included, some of the worst air quality readings in decades. For a stretch that week, monitors ranked the New York City area as having the worst air quality of any major city in the world, and the smoke was thick enough to visibly dim the sun and cool afternoon temperatures. Districts across Westchester cancelled outdoor recess and after-school sports.
That event was not a one-off. Canadian wildfire smoke has become a recurring summer risk for the whole Northeast corridor, and unlike ozone, which builds slowly over a hot afternoon, smoke can arrive overnight and clear just as fast. That is exactly the kind of swing a seasonal average or a once-a-day forecast will miss, and the kind a live sensor reading will not.
Yonkers' seven hills mean neighborhoods do not all breathe the same air
Yonkers is nicknamed the City of Seven Hills — Park, Nodine, Ridge, Cross, Locust, Glen, and Church — and its elevation runs from sea level at the Hudson River up to 416 feet at Sacred Heart. Low-lying neighborhoods near Getty Square, the Saw Mill River corridor, and the streets closest to the Major Deegan and the Bronx border sit right against the traffic corridors described above, while the hilltop neighborhoods get more mixing and generally clearer air on the same afternoon.
That unevenness shows up in the health data, too. A 2024 CDC analysis of pre-pandemic asthma emergency department visits, Asthma Hot Spots in New York, flagged zip codes around Yonkers in Westchester County as hotspots. A single county-wide AQI number cannot tell you which side of that divide your street is on, which is why Canairy reads sensors near the specific places you have actually saved rather than one distant regional monitor.
Yonkers air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Yonkers right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:28 AM EDT, the air quality in Yonkers, New York is AQI 8 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.5 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Yonkers get hazy in summer?
Westchester County sits inside the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island ozone nonattainment area, which the EPA reclassified from Moderate to Serious for the 2015 ozone standard. On hot, still days between April and September, exhaust from the Thruway, the Major Deegan, and Yonkers' other highway corridors cooks into ground-level ozone, and pollution drifting up the Hudson corridor from New York City adds to it.
Does wildfire smoke ever reach Yonkers?
Yes. In June 2023, smoke from wildfires in Quebec gave the New York City area, including Yonkers, some of its worst air quality in decades, briefly ranking it among the worst of any major city in the world. Canadian wildfire smoke has become a recurring summer risk for the whole region since, and it can arrive and clear within a day.
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 Yonkers, 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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