EPA's AIRNow

US Environmental Protection Agency

About this app

The AIRNow Android application will provide an increasingly mobile public with real-time air quality information that people can use to protect their health when planning their daily activities

The app will allow users to get location-specific reports on current air quality and air quality forecasts for both ozone and fine particle pollution (PM2.5). Air quality maps from the AIRNow website provide visual depictions of current and forecast air quality nationwide, and a page on air quality-related health effects explains what actions people can take to protect their health at different AQI levels, such as “code orange.”

Ratings and reviews

I was a little worried about using this app after reading the comments. I downloaded it & it works well. All the information for my surrounding area is pretty accurate (sometimes the data in some points can be wrong but if you look at the surrounding areas, you will get a good reaading) If you hit the button that says smoke on the bottom left, it gives you a very detailed picture of where smoke is traveling from wildfires and where the most current wildfires are, along with air quality data.

Doesn't give real time data? I don't know. The website data is always several hours delayed. This doesn't give a time stamp of when it was last updated. Also doesn't let me see nearest monitors, and I'm in between several. Useful for doing a quick check of different places I'm traveling to though. But the website is probably easier to use, although much slower loading. And then load again to get actual monitor location data... So slow.

Would be cool if they provided trends so you can see changes over the past week from recorded data. I don't mind checking a couple times every day, but if the data exists, why not make it available and easy to see? I'd rather not write a program to collect hourly data from the website... But if I have to, I might... Maybe the devs should just make this a quick feature like a chart or something.

What's new

This release adds two maps to give the public additional, actionable information about air pollution at their location: the popular Fire and Smoke Map, which provides information on fire locations, smoke plumes and air quality from monitors and low-cost sensors; and the AirNow Interactive Map, which shows ozone and particulate matter from air quality monitors across the country.