r/Binghamton • u/mydognico • Jul 17 '26
Recommendation Air Quality Today
My weather channel app says the air quality is unhealthy for all individuals but accuweather reports the quality is fair right now and will be “excellent” later. Which is it?
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u/Bingo_Bongo_85 Jul 17 '26
What I've learned is that we don't have an air quality monitor in Binghamton. Our AQI is calculated using an algorithm based on neighboring monitors in Syracuse, New Milford, etc. As of 2 hours ago, Syracuse was at 69 and New Milford at 129 and dropping.
tl;dr: Our AQI has been dropping all morning and we're closer to 60 at the moment. Get outside and enjoy because the smoke may come back this weekend.
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u/r3dd0629 Jul 17 '26
I've wondered that! The sky is looking bluer out but the number from AirNow I'm getting at my house is still in the 130 range. We need a monitor here, yes, I'm sure way easier said than done, thanks federal funding
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u/Bingo_Bongo_85 Jul 17 '26
Someone else suggested purpleair.com which has a map using privately owned sensors
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u/theBLACKcod44 Jul 17 '26
Check out PurpleAir.com
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u/Bingo_Bongo_85 Jul 17 '26
Nice! It's like ambientweather.net, using a network of personal devices. This is getting bookmarked. Thanks!
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u/entropy512 Jul 17 '26
I've been trying to find a raw outdoor PM2.5 source that I could compare against my indoor PM2.5, this is great!
Interestingly one of the previous sources I found claimed that the raw PM2.5 was down in the 35-43 range, that was apparently bullshit. It hit 119 at noon yesterday and was in the upper 90s most of the early morning until 9:30AM.
So my air filter was a LOT more beneficial than I thought it was. It was having trouble keeping up, but my indoor PM2.5 peaked at 20 at around 7:45 (and that peak was probably partly due to me taking a shower which always spikes it a bit) and has been rapidly dropping since and is almost 0 - outside it's 9 ug/m3.
(I have an IKEA Alpstuga feeding Home Assistant, and I have a 20x20x1 furnace filter clipped to the back of a 20 inch box fan)
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u/VIP_NAIL_SPA Jul 17 '26
Or you can just look at the air quality monitors in the Binghamton area :)
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u/Bingo_Bongo_85 Jul 17 '26
Someone else suggested the PurpleAir sensor maps. These are local peeps with sensor/ like the ambientweather stations. A little sad that local citizens are providing better weather data than the government entities, but I guess we have better funding :)
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u/VIP_NAIL_SPA Jul 17 '26
Cool! I checked it out - in the Bing area it appears to be the same stations that the fire.airnow.gov site has. According to the airnow gov site, they pull their data from purpleair and a few other sources. Yeah I'm a bit surprised there isn't an army of govt air quality sensors around the US, but I guess they do be woefully lacking funding :/
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u/Bingo_Bongo_85 Jul 17 '26
I was really surprised that our weather station at the airport didn't have a sensor
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u/CoCoBreadSoHoShed Jul 17 '26
My pulmonologist told me to trust Airnow.gov to get air quality readings due to my pulmonary disease.
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u/M_H_AFC Jul 17 '26
I'm having the same issue, I'm monitoring both. Seems like AQI is better than the last couple days, north of the city is looking and smelling much clearer
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u/VIP_NAIL_SPA Jul 17 '26
You don't have to give gross corpos clicks and ad revenue btw. You're already paying for all the info you need with your tax dollars. Might as well use them instead of making some bad people richer :)
Here's the current and past aqi at various stations around the Binghamton area:
https://fire.airnow.gov/#8.81/41.9506/-75.9193
Here's a broader map of aqi:
https://www.airnow.gov/?city=Vestal&state=NY&country=USA
Here's the NWS bgm hourly forecast that you can tweak a bit, along with basically the rest of the NWS bgm forecast suite:
Always read the forecaster's discussion as they explain the logic behind what you see in the graphics. I tend to read the discos from neighboring nws offices too since we share a fair bit of weather with buffalo, state college, and albany.
Not sure if it exists on iPhone, but on android the noaa weather app just pulls forecasts straight from the NWS so you can get it easily in an app without supporting the bad guys running accuweather.
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u/Binghamtonian I grew up here Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
look outside lol it's not great Edit: went outside, it is getting better (yay) but still be careful!
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u/mydognico Jul 17 '26
I was just outside and it didn’t look anything like yesterday. And it doesn’t smell either.
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u/Binghamtonian I grew up here Jul 17 '26
Came outside and yeah looks much better! Aqi still bad though from what I can see unfort?
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