Air Quality in Bloomington, Minnesota — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Bloomington — with free alerts when Canadian wildfire smoke or summer haze rolls in.
AQI 28 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Bloomington, Minnesota is AQI 28 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 5.0 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 21 to 36. 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 Bloomington: 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 Bloomington and Richfield, Edina, Eden Prairie, Eagan. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Bloomington
The sensors Canairy reads in Bloomington agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 15-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 3.7 mi NNW | 36 | Good |
| 4.6 mi N | 28 | Good |
| 4.8 mi NNW | 22 | Good |
| 5.2 mi WNW | 29 | Good |
| 5.8 mi NE | 21 | Good |
Most of the year, the air in Bloomington is genuinely good. This stretch of the Minnesota River valley doesn't have the terrain to trap pollution the way a mountain valley does, and Twin Cities wind usually clears out whatever the metro produces on its own. The exception arrives from far away: when wildfires burn across Ontario, Quebec, or the Canadian prairies, that smoke drifts south and settles over the metro for days at a time, most memorably during the record-breaking summer of 2023.
What Canairy does for Bloomington
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Bloomington: 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 Bloomington or across the country, on one screen.
Bloomington's terrain doesn't trap air — Canada's wildfires still reach it
Bloomington sits on the north bank of the Minnesota River, just above where it meets the Mississippi, with a sand plain in the northeast and low hills across the rest of the city. None of that terrain boxes in air the way a mountain valley does — there's no ridge here holding smoke or haze in place overnight. Most days, prevailing winds off the open prairie move air through the metro rather than letting it settle.
That's exactly why the exceptions are so noticeable: when the air does turn bad, it's almost always smoke that traveled hundreds of miles to get here, not something produced locally. The Twin Cities have no wildfire risk of their own to speak of — the source is Canada's boreal forest, and a bad fire season there is what actually shows up on Bloomington's sensors.
2023 was the year Canadian smoke rewrote Minnesota's record book
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency typically issues two or three air quality alerts a year. In 2023, after an unusually dry spring left Quebec and Ontario's forests primed to burn, the agency issued 23 — breaking the previous record of 21 set two years earlier, in 2021. On June 14, 2023, Minneapolis's air quality index hit 256, deep in the Unhealthy range, among the worst readings the metro had ever recorded.
Two weeks later, on June 27, MPCA declared its 23rd alert of the year, covering southern Minnesota, Bloomington included, along with the east-central and northeastern parts of the state, as smoke from fires in Ontario and Quebec rolled back in and visibly dimmed the Minneapolis-St. Paul skyline. The pattern hasn't gone away: MPCA issued similar alerts covering parts of the state again in July 2026, the kind of summer that's becoming the new normal for the Upper Midwest.
Summer also brings a quieter risk: ground-level ozone
Wildfire smoke isn't Bloomington's only summer air problem. On hot, humid, sunny afternoons, MPCA issues separate ozone alerts for the seven-county Twin Cities metro when heat, humidity, and vehicle exhaust combine to form ground-level ozone — a different pollutant from wildfire smoke, made locally rather than imported. Bloomington sits right at the interchange of I-494, I-35W, and Highway 77, one of the busiest stretches of freeway in the state, exactly the kind of traffic corridor that feeds an ozone alert.
These ozone alerts typically run from around noon to 9 p.m., peaking in mid-to-late afternoon rather than at rush hour, which makes them easy to miss if you're only checking the air in the morning. Anyone with asthma, or anyone planning an outdoor workout on a still, hot July day, is better off checking before noon than after the fact.
Bloomington air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Bloomington right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:10 AM CDT, the air quality in Bloomington, Minnesota is AQI 28 — Good — with PM2.5 at 5.0 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did Minnesota set a record for air quality alerts in 2023?
Wildfire smoke drifting down from Ontario and Quebec pushed the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to issue 23 separate air quality alerts in 2023, breaking the previous record of 21 set in 2021 — in a typical year the state issues only two or three. On June 14, 2023, Minneapolis's air quality index hit 256, and by late June smoke had settled over Bloomington and the rest of southern Minnesota again, visibly dimming the Twin Cities skyline.
Does ground-level ozone affect Bloomington in summer?
Yes. On hot, humid, sunny days the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency issues separate ozone alerts for the seven-county Twin Cities metro, usually in effect from around noon to 9 p.m. Bloomington's location at the junction of I-494, I-35W, and Highway 77 puts it right in one of the state's busiest traffic corridors, which is part of what feeds ozone formation on those days.
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 Bloomington, 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 Bloomington
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