Air Quality in Bend, Oregon — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Bend — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 7 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Bend, Oregon is AQI 7 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 1.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 0 to 11. 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 Bend: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very 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 Bend and Redmond, Sisters, Sunriver, Tumalo. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Bend
The sensors Canairy reads in Bend agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 11-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.8 mi SW | 7 | Good |
| 1.7 mi ESE | 7 | Good |
| 3.2 mi SSW | 11 | Good |
| 3.3 mi WSW | 0 | Good |
| 4.7 mi E | 9 | Good |
Bend sits in the high desert just east of the Cascade crest, and for most of the year the air here is clean and dry. The trouble is what the wind carries in: when wildfires burn in the Cascades to the west or across eastern Oregon, smoke settles over the city, and in bad years it can turn the sky orange for days at a time.
What Canairy does for Bend
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Bend: 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 Bend or across the country, on one screen.
Cascade fires to the west, high desert to the east
Bend's geography is the whole story. The city sits at the eastern foot of the Cascades, where prevailing westerly winds spill over the crest and can drag smoke from fires on the wet side of the mountains straight into town. To the east and south lies open high desert of ponderosa pine and juniper that carries its own fires, so smoke can arrive from almost any direction depending on the wind.
September 2020 showed how bad it can get. Smoke from the Lionshead, Beachie Creek and Holiday Farm fires poured over the Cascades and pushed Bend's air quality index to 499 on the morning of September 11 — deep in the hazardous range. Nearby Sisters hit 559 and Redmond 450, and Governor Kate Brown said Oregon's air ranked worst in the world that day.
The smoke season now runs from August into fall
Bad smoke used to be rare here. Between 1987 and 2014 Bend recorded just three Unhealthy days from wildfire smoke. From 2015 through 2020 it logged 13 Unhealthy, five Very Unhealthy and six Hazardous days, and the PM2.5 measured in September and October 2020 was higher than anything since the state began monitoring Bend's air in 1985.
The 2022 Cedar Creek Fire made the point again. It started August 1 east of Oakridge in the Western Cascades, burned roughly 127,000 acres, and smoldered into October — sending waves of smoke that left Bend and La Pine with hazardous air and prompting repeated DEQ advisories. More recently, in July 2026, smoke from the Akawa Fire near Sisters and the Brewer and Box Springs fires northeast of Prineville pushed Bend above 200 and Prineville toward 300, closing outdoor pools and moving city recreation programs indoors.
Bend already beat one air problem — woodstove smoke
Two decades ago the worst air in Bend came in winter, not summer. Thousands of household wood stoves put fine smoke into the air, and when a temperature inversion clamped down over the high desert the smoky layer would sit trapped over the city until a wind finally cleared it. Cold, still winter nights were the ones to watch.
That problem has largely been solved. Oregon DEQ's Heat Smart program and EPA-certified stove rules pushed households toward cleaner heat pumps, gas and certified stoves, and the winter haze faded. The lesson locals took from it is that particle pollution here is seasonal and worth tracking — which is exactly why a live sensor reading beats guessing from the color of the sky, in July or January.
Bend air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Bend right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Bend, Oregon is AQI 7 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Is there a live AQI map for Bend?
Yes — the map on this page plots every PurpleAir sensor in and around Bend in real time, from the west side out to Redmond and Sisters, so you can check the exact reading nearest you instead of one citywide average. Save your address in the free Canairy app and you'll get an alert the moment your local sensor crosses into unhealthy air.
When is wildfire smoke worst in Bend?
Smoke season in Bend usually runs from August into the fall, when fires in the Cascades to the west and across eastern Oregon are most active and westerly winds carry the smoke over the high desert. The worst episodes on record came in September 2020 and during the 2022 Cedar Creek Fire, and heavy smoke returned in July 2026. Because it depends entirely on where fires are burning and which way the wind blows, a live sensor reading is the only reliable way to know how the air is on a given day.
Does Bend still have a winter wood smoke problem?
Much less than it used to. Twenty years ago wintertime woodstove smoke was Bend's main air pollution source, trapped over the city by temperature inversions on cold, still nights. Oregon DEQ's Heat Smart program and EPA stove standards moved most households to cleaner heat, and wildfire smoke has since become the dominant concern. Winter inversions can still hold particle pollution near the ground, so it is worth checking the map on cold, calm days too.
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 Bend, 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
Go deeper
Air quality near Bend
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