Air Quality in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Broken Arrow — with free alerts when summer ozone climbs.
AQI 52 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma is AQI 52 — Moderate and falling — with PM2.5 at 9.5 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 47 to 54. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
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 Broken Arrow: trees 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 Broken Arrow and Tulsa, Bixby, Coweta, Wagoner. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Broken Arrow
The sensors Canairy reads in Broken Arrow are 7 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2.6 mi NNW | 47 | Good |
| 10.9 mi SE | 54 | Moderate |
Broken Arrow's air is unremarkable most of the year — there's no wildfire smoke season here, no coastal fog, no valley trapping anything overnight. The real story is ground-level ozone, and it's a regional one: on hot, sunny, low-wind summer afternoons, tailpipe and industrial emissions from across the Tulsa metro cook into smog that settles over the whole airshed, Broken Arrow included.
What Canairy does for Broken Arrow
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Broken Arrow: 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 Broken Arrow or across the country, on one screen.
Broken Arrow shares Tulsa County's F grade for ozone
The American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report, which scores counties on 2022-2024 monitoring data, gave Tulsa County an F for ozone pollution — the worst mark of any Oklahoma county and one of eight statewide failing grades that year. The county logged 28 days when ozone reached the "unhealthy for sensitive groups" level, more than anywhere else in the state, and the Tulsa-Bartlesville-Muskogee metro area ranked 20th nationally on the ALA's list of the most ozone-polluted metro areas.
Broken Arrow doesn't have its own dedicated air monitor, but that F grade isn't a downtown-Tulsa problem the suburbs escape — ozone forms in the air mass drifting over the whole metro, and Broken Arrow sits inside the same Tulsa County line the grade covers. On a bad-ozone afternoon, the sky over Broken Arrow looks exactly like the sky over downtown Tulsa, because it's the same air.
A 30-plus-year voluntary alert program covers the whole metro
Since the 1990s, the regional planning agency INCOG has run the Ozone Alert! Program each year from April through October, the stretch when Tulsa-area ozone is most likely to spike. On days the forecast calls for the 8-hour ozone average to approach or exceed the program's 0.071 ppm trigger, INCOG asks residents and businesses across the metro — Broken Arrow, Bixby, Jenks, Owasso, and Tulsa itself — to voluntarily cut back on driving, defer gas-powered lawn equipment, and limit idling until the afternoon heat breaks.
Five monitors feed the program's daily numbers: west at Mannford, east at Lynn Lane, central in Tulsa, north in Skiatook, and south in Glenpool. The trend the network has measured is genuinely improving — 14 exceedance days in 2023, 6 in 2024, and none recorded through 2025 — and the current three-year design value of 0.065 ppm meets the federal ozone standard. That's the other half of the honest picture: the same region the ALA graded F for unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups days is, by the stricter federal compliance measure, currently in attainment.
Summer heat, not smoke, is what pushes the numbers up
Broken Arrow's climate is humid subtropical, with hot, muggy summers and no mountain range or coastline nearby to stir the air or confine pollution to one dramatic season the way wildfire smoke does out West. Ozone here isn't blown in from somewhere else — it forms locally, when sunlight cooks nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds from cars, industrial boilers, and gas equipment on hot, calm afternoons.
That's why ozone alerts cluster on the still, sunny days of July and August rather than any single weather event, and why a clear-looking afternoon can still be moving through the day's worst stretch, typically mid-afternoon into early evening. Without a smoke season to watch for, the useful habit in Broken Arrow is checking the ozone forecast before an outdoor practice or afternoon run in summer, the same way other cities watch a wildfire map.
Broken Arrow air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Broken Arrow right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 9:54 AM CDT, the air quality in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma is AQI 52 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 9.5 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Broken Arrow get ozone alerts in summer?
Broken Arrow sits inside the Tulsa metro's shared airshed, and on hot, sunny, low-wind days from April through October, sunlight reacts with emissions from vehicles, industrial boilers, and gas-powered equipment to form ground-level ozone. The regional planning agency INCOG has run a voluntary Ozone Alert! Program since the 1990s, asking the whole metro - Broken Arrow included - to cut driving and idling on the days ozone is forecast to spike.
Does Tulsa County's ozone grade apply to Broken Arrow?
Yes. The American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report gave Tulsa County an F for ozone, with 28 days of unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups readings over 2022-2024 - the worst in Oklahoma. Broken Arrow doesn't have its own monitor, but it shares the same county air mass those readings measure, so the grade reflects the air over Broken Arrow as much as it does downtown Tulsa.
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 Broken Arrow, 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 Broken Arrow
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