Air Quality in Bismarck, North Dakota — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Bismarck — with free alerts when Canadian wildfire smoke drifts into North Dakota.
AQI 14 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Bismarck, North Dakota is AQI 14 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 2.6 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 12 to 17. 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 Bismarck: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very high 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 Bismarck and Mandan, Lincoln, Menoken, New Salem. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Bismarck
The sensors Canairy reads in Bismarck agree right now — all 2 sit in the Good band, a 5-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 5.2 mi NNE | 17 | Good |
| 6.1 mi N | 12 | Good |
Bismarck sits out in the open on the North Dakota plains, and on most days that openness works in the city's favor — there's no valley or ridgeline here to trap anything, and the wind that moves across Burleigh County clears out haze about as fast as it builds up. The exception is wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada, which has turned Bismarck's sky orange and pushed the statewide AQI into the Unhealthy and, at times, Hazardous range during recent fire seasons — most notably in May and again over August 29-30, 2023, when North Dakota's Department of Environmental Quality issued health warnings covering nearly the entire state.
What Canairy does for Bismarck
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Bismarck: 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 Bismarck or across the country, on one screen.
Bismarck's air is usually good — flat, windy plains see to that
Bismarck sits on the east bank of the Missouri River at about 1,745 feet of elevation, on wide-open Great Plains terrain with nothing resembling the mountains or valley walls that trap smoke in places like California wine country. There's little here to hold pollution in place: the wind that moves across central North Dakota on a typical day carries particulates and haze out of the area about as fast as anything puts them in. On an ordinary day, Bismarck's monitored PM2.5 sits in the single digits, well inside the EPA's Good range.
That's also why North Dakota's Department of Environmental Quality runs a monitoring station in Bismarck year-round rather than only during fire season — Burleigh County doesn't have a refinery, a major highway bottleneck, or heavy industry pushing everyday pollution, so a quiet baseline is the norm here rather than something achieved by controlling local sources. It's precisely because that baseline is so calm that a smoke event stands out as sharply as it does.
The real story is smoke that starts hundreds of miles away, in Canada
North Dakota doesn't have its own wildfire problem on the scale of the Rockies or the West Coast, but it sits directly downwind of the boreal forests of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta, and when those provinces have a bad fire year, the smoke travels south. In May 2023, and again over August 29-30, 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires pushed air quality across nearly the entire state into the Unhealthy, Very Unhealthy, and even Hazardous categories — the state's monitoring maps that week showed Bismarck under the same red, purple, and maroon bands as the rest of North Dakota.
It happened again in September 2025, when the state's Department of Environmental Quality issued another advisory as Canadian wildfire smoke drifted back across North Dakota, warning people with asthma, heart conditions, and other respiratory sensitivities to limit time outdoors. The department now keeps a standing wildfire-smoke monitoring page that cross-references EPA AirNow data with the Canadian government's Firesmoke.ca forecast model, because this isn't a one-time event — it's a recurring risk most summers and into early fall.
Why one number for the metro doesn't tell the whole story
Smoke from Canada doesn't arrive on a schedule, and it doesn't sit over Bismarck evenly. A front pushing smoke down from Saskatchewan can lay a thick layer over one side of the city while the air along the river bottoms stays noticeably clearer, or the reverse, depending on which way the wind is moving that day. That's a different problem than the terrain-trapped smoke you'd see in a mountain valley — here it's about which direction the plume happens to be sliding across the plains, and that can shift within a few hours.
Because Bismarck and Mandan sit on opposite banks of the Missouri River, checking a single number for 'the metro area' can miss what's actually happening at your house. Canairy reads the sensors near the places you've actually saved instead of one reading for the whole region, so you're not guessing whether a smoke report from one side of the river tells you anything about the other.
Bismarck air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Bismarck right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:10 AM CDT, the air quality in Bismarck, North Dakota is AQI 14 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.6 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Bismarck get smoky in summer?
Bismarck sits downwind of the boreal forests of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta, and when Canada has a bad wildfire year the smoke travels south. That happened twice in 2023 — in May and again over August 29-30 — when smoke pushed air quality across North Dakota into the Unhealthy, Very Unhealthy, and Hazardous categories, and again in September 2025 when the state issued another advisory. It isn't a local fire risk; it's prairie wind carrying someone else's smoke this direction.
Is Bismarck's air quality usually good?
Yes. Bismarck sits on open Great Plains terrain with no valley walls or mountains to trap pollution, and the wind that moves through Burleigh County most days clears out haze quickly. On a typical day the city's PM2.5 readings sit well inside the EPA's Good range — the exceptions are the Canadian wildfire smoke events that roll through most summers.
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 2 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Bismarck, 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 Bismarck
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