Air Quality in Barre, Vermont — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Barre — with free alerts when wood smoke or wildfire haze settles into the valley.
AQI 0 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Barre, Vermont is AQI 0 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 0.0 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 0 to 0. 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 Barre: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a low 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 Barre and Montpelier, Berlin, Websterville, Northfield. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Barre
The sensors Canairy reads in Barre agree right now — all 3 sit in the Good band, a 0-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.6 mi SE | 0 | Good |
| 5.8 mi NW | 0 | Good |
| 7.7 mi NNW | 0 | Good |
Barre's air is genuinely clean most of the year — this is rural central Vermont, and Washington County's monitors typically sit in the "Good" range. The two times that changes are winter, when wood stoves and furnaces fill the Stevens Branch valley with smoke on cold, still nights, and summer, when smoke drifting down from Quebec can push the whole state into unhealthy territory, as it did for weeks in 2023.
What Canairy does for Barre
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Barre: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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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
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Barre calls itself the Granite Center of the World
Vast granite deposits at Millstone Hill, just outside downtown, turned Barre into the country's granite-cutting capital after the War of 1812 — the workforce grew from about 100 quarrymen in 1880 to roughly 3,000 by 1910. For decades, the air inside the sheds where that stone was cut was the real hazard: fine silica dust scarred workers' lungs and made silicosis the city's signature occupational disease.
Historian David R. Seager documented the fight against it in "Barre, Vermont Granite Workers and the Struggle Against Silicosis, 1890-1960." A later CDC mortality study of shed workers found that men employed before 1938 had breathed dust levels around 40 million particles per cubic foot, versus under 10 million after 1940, once ventilation and wet-cutting rules took hold. Deaths from silicosis and tuberculosis among granite workers effectively ended after that — a reminder that this city has been reading the air seriously for over a century, long before phone apps did it for you.
Winter is when Barre's own air quality actually dips
Barre sits low in the Stevens Branch and Jail Branch valleys, ringed by the hills that made it famous for granite, and on calm, cold nights that terrain traps air instead of letting it clear. The Vermont Department of Health points to wood stoves and furnaces as the dominant winter pollution source in towns like this, and monitoring for the Barre-Montpelier area shows the seasonal PM2.5 spikes concentrated in January, even though the annual average stays firmly in "Good" territory.
It's a quieter story than wildfire smoke, but a real one: a still January evening with half the neighborhood's chimneys going can push fine-particle readings noticeably higher than a summer afternoon, especially in the low-lying blocks closest to the Stevens Branch.
Barre isn't immune to Canadian wildfire smoke either
In late June 2023, smoke from close to 30 out-of-control wildfires in Quebec and Ontario pushed Vermont's air quality to levels the state had never recorded. Burlington's PM2.5 hit 174 micrograms per cubic meter overnight — an AQI of 224, "very unhealthy" — on the same day Montreal had the worst air quality of any city on Earth. The smoke wasn't a Lake Champlain problem alone; it settled statewide, and central Vermont spent stretches of that summer under the same hazy, orange-tinted skies.
Vermont Public's coverage that summer put it plainly: occasional smoky days from Quebec fires are now part of a Vermont summer, not a one-off. That's the pattern Barre shares with the rest of the state — clean air as the baseline, with real exceptions worth knowing about before they show up as a scratchy throat.
Barre air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Barre right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:08 AM EDT, the air quality in Barre, Vermont is AQI 0 — Good — with PM2.5 at 0.0 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did Barre's air get smoky in the summer of 2023?
Smoke from nearly 30 wildfires burning in Quebec and Ontario blew south into Vermont in June and July 2023, pushing statewide air quality to its worst levels on record - Burlington alone hit a PM2.5-based AQI of 224. Central Vermont, including Barre, shared in that same smoke event, and Vermont officials now treat a few hazy days each summer as a recurring possibility rather than a fluke.
Does wood smoke affect Barre's air in the winter?
Yes. Barre sits low in the Stevens Branch valley, and on cold, still nights the surrounding hills trap smoke from wood stoves and furnaces close to the ground. The Vermont Department of Health names residential wood heat as the leading winter air pollution source in valley towns like this, with the biggest seasonal upticks typically showing up in January.
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 Barre, 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 Barre
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