Air Quality in Anchorage, Alaska — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Anchorage — with free alerts when winter inversions or wildfire smoke move in.
AQI 71 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Anchorage, Alaska is AQI 71 — Moderate and rising — with PM2.5 at 19.6 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 32 to 81. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.3 times 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 is quiet in Anchorage right now. Google's pollen forecast covers this area and shows no tree, grass or weed activity today — which is a real answer, not missing data.
Free to download · Live data from PurpleAir & public monitors
Live PurpleAir sensor map for Anchorage and Eagle River, Chugiak, Girdwood, Wasilla. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Anchorage
The sensors Canairy reads in Anchorage are 49 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.7 mi S | 67 | Moderate |
| 1.7 mi SSE | 74 | Moderate |
| 2.6 mi ESE | 81 | Moderate |
| 3.5 mi SSE | 62 | Moderate |
| 7.2 mi SE | 32 | Good |
Anchorage's air is good most of the year, helped by a coastal climate and winds off Cook Inlet that keep things from sitting still for long. The exceptions are specific and predictable: from roughly October through March, cold, calm nights can lock a temperature inversion over the city and trap wood smoke and exhaust close to the ground for days at a stretch, and in June through August, wildfire smoke from the Kenai Peninsula or Mat-Su can drift into town even when the fire itself is a hundred miles away.
What Canairy does for Anchorage
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Anchorage: 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 Anchorage or across the country, on one screen.
Anchorage's winters trap smoke in "the bowl"
Locals call the lowland shelf between Cook Inlet and the Chugach Mountains "the bowl," and the same geography that gives Anchorage its rain shadow also works against it in winter. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation tracks PM2.5 here specifically because strong temperature inversions are common from October through March: cold air pools at ground level under a warmer layer above, and whatever gets released into it — wood-stove smoke, exhaust from cold-soaked engines, heating-oil combustion — has nowhere to go until the inversion breaks.
The fixes have mostly targeted the biggest single source. The Municipality regulates the installation of outdoor wood boilers, and the state's Burnwise program tracks which stove models can legally be sold, because on a still, sub-zero night a neighborhood of smoldering stoves can push a monitor into unhealthy territory before sunrise. There's no such thing as a typical Anchorage winter reading — a calm, -10°F night with everyone burning wood looks nothing like a windy, 20°F afternoon, which is exactly the gap a live sensor reading is built to catch instead of a seasonal average.
Anchorage's air-quality history was actually about dust, not smoke
Long before wildfire smoke became the seasonal concern, Anchorage had a federal nonattainment problem over windblown dust off unpaved roads. Between 1985 and 1987 the Municipality recorded violations of the old particulate standard, largely because much of the city was still gravel-road terrain and one monitor sat beside a heavily trafficked dirt street. The response was blunt and effective: Anchorage paved and resurfaced its gravel roads through the early 1990s — 8.6 miles alone with recycled asphalt product in 1992-1993 — and the city hasn't recorded a violation since October 1987.
Eagle River, a community about 12 miles north of downtown that's part of the Municipality, carried its own separate PM10 nonattainment designation for the same reason long after the main bowl cleared up, and didn't get the EPA's sign-off on a redesignation and maintenance plan until 2013. It's a reminder that Anchorage's dust problem, unlike its smoke problem, was entirely local and solvable — once the roads were paved, the exceedances simply stopped.
Wildfire smoke and volcanic ash are the wild cards
Southcentral Alaska's fire season runs roughly June through August, and fires burning well outside city limits can still fill the bowl with smoke. The 2019 Swan Lake Fire, lightning-sparked on June 5 on the Kenai Peninsula and eventually burning roughly 170,000 acres, sent smoke into Anchorage repeatedly that summer; by August 19 the city's own particulate reading had climbed to nearly 200 — unhealthy for everyone — and the municipal health department issued an advisory.
The other wild card is one few US cities plan around: volcanic ash. Mount Spurr, an active volcano about 75 miles west across Cook Inlet, has dusted Anchorage before — a 1992 eruption from its Crater Peak vent dropped roughly a quarter inch of ash on the city and closed Ted Stevens International Airport for two days. Spurr stirred again through 2024 and into 2025, with enough earthquakes and ground deformation that the Alaska Volcano Observatory raised its alert level and the Municipality activated its volcano response plan, before activity eased and the alert was lifted in August 2025. Fine ash is a respiratory hazard for the same reason PM2.5 is, which is why it shows up on the same sensors.
Anchorage air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Anchorage right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 3:43 PM PDT, the air quality in Anchorage, Alaska is AQI 71 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 19.6 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Anchorage's air get bad in winter?
From roughly October through March, strong temperature inversions can settle over the Anchorage bowl and trap cold air near the ground for days at a time — along with wood-stove smoke, vehicle exhaust, and heating-oil combustion. It's a different mechanism from wildfire smoke, which is why state monitors track PM2.5 through the winter as well as through fire season.
Does wildfire smoke reach Anchorage?
Yes. Southcentral Alaska's fire season runs roughly June through August, and smoke from fires on the Kenai Peninsula or in the Mat-Su Valley can drift into the bowl even when the fire itself is many miles away. The 2019 Swan Lake Fire pushed Anchorage's own particulate reading to nearly 200 and prompted a municipal health advisory.
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 Anchorage, 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 Anchorage
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