As described HERE, and as reported in The Jamestown News last year, eight air sensors are on loan to Jamestown citizens from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through April 2026.
Since November 2024, the sensors have been reporting our air quality in realtime on an interactive worldwide map, and I’ve been downloading data every other week, supplementing it with readings during periods of unusual activity, high air pollution, and atmospheric smoke
Here’s a brief summary to date.
Our AQI (Air Quality Index) readings are shared with sites like AccuWeather, WeatherBug, Google Maps, AirNow.gov and Weather Underground. The AQI gives the daily air quality number using a scale of 0 to 500, calculated for pollutants such as ground-level ozone, particle matter, and carbon monoxide:
From November 2024 through the end of September 2025, the sensors, as a group, had an average AQI of 49.8.
The worst months were July, June, January and August, in that order. The worst days were Sunday, Nov 24, 2024 (115); Friday, March 14, 2025 (103); Wed, Feb 5, 2025 (97); Wed, June 25, 2025 (93); Tues, July 8, 2025 (93); Thurs, Dec 26, 2024 (92); Wed, March 19, 2025 (91).
Here’s how the monthly average graphed for all of the sensors:
The worst AQI monthly average (56) was recorded by the air sensor at Riverdale Road:
The second highest AQI monthly average was recorded by the sensor at Penny Road near Piedmont Environmental Center – this is a privately owned sensor that also measures VOCs (volatile organic compounds):
The third highest AQI levels were recorded at the sensor in Forestdale East:
VOLATILE ORGANIC COMPOUNDS
The [experimental] VOC sensor on Penny Road averaged daily results equal to 142.4, with many readings in the 200 to 300 range:
Here’s how Penny Road compared to nearby VOC-enabled sensors in Thomasville (the green line on the chart below), and A&T University in Greensboro:
The VOC and AQI numbers are so high at A&T that I drove over one day to see if I could find the source – it’s an old steam plant:
PARTICULATE MATTER PM2.5
In 2023, due to an extensive body of science linking air particle pollution to a range of serious and sometimes deadly diseases, the EPA set a new health-based standard for particulate air matter that measures less than 2.5 microns in diameter, written as PM2.5.
In February 2024 the EPA set the federal annual average standard for PM2.5 at 9.0 µg/m3. Since 2021, the World Health Organization has kept the maximum annual health level standard at 5.
The EPA’s federal 24-hour health limit for PM2.5 is 35 µg/m3. The World Health Organization says 24-hour average exposures should not exceed 15 µg/m3 more than four days in one year.
View our sensors live on the PurpleAir worldwide map, HERE. These two videos will hopefully help you get started: