Air Quality in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Cedar Rapids — with free alerts the moment the air actually turns.
AQI 13 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Cedar Rapids, Iowa is AQI 13 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.4 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 0 to 25. 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 Cedar Rapids: 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 Cedar Rapids and Marion, Hiawatha, Robins, Fairfax. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Cedar Rapids
The sensors Canairy reads in Cedar Rapids agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 25-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.9 mi NNW | 14 | Good |
| 1.4 mi ENE | 25 | Good |
| 2.6 mi E | 0 | Good |
| 3.6 mi SSE | 12 | Good |
Most days, Cedar Rapids's air is fine by the numbers — but the city has two distinct air stories, and they aren't the same thing. One is a nose-level nuisance: Cedar Rapids has been needled for a century about its smell, thanks to the grain-processing plants that line the Cedar River, and locals still half-joke about the "City of Five Smells." The other is a real health event: on June 27, 2023, smoke drifting down from Canadian wildfires pushed the city's measured AQI to 264, the worst air quality on record here and briefly the highest reading anywhere in Iowa.
What Canairy does for Cedar Rapids
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Cedar Rapids: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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Cedar Rapids has smelled like breakfast for a century
The nickname "City of Five Smells" dates to the 1970s, when residents started tallying the combination drifting through downtown: the Quaker Oats and Penford grain-processing plants, a hog slaughterhouse, and the city's sewage plant and landfill. The Quaker plant, now run by PepsiCo, is still operating on the same bank of the Cedar River it has occupied since 1873 — the World Record Academy has recognized it as the largest cereal plant on Earth, with roughly 1,000 workers turning corn and oats into cereal, grits, and snacks around the clock.
That smell is real, but it's worth separating from the AQI number this page tracks. Grain dust and cooking odors are mostly volatile compounds that your nose catches long before a PM2.5 sensor would call the air unhealthy. On a still, humid summer evening, the smell can hang heaviest over downtown and the near southwest side closest to the mills, even on a day the AQI reads Good. Cargill, ADM, and General Mills all still run processing plants in the metro too, so the city's grain-belt economy is baked into its air, for better and worse.
The worst air Cedar Rapids has ever measured came from Canada
On June 27, 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires poured into eastern Iowa and pushed Cedar Rapids's AQI to 264 — very unhealthy, and the highest reading recorded anywhere in the state that day. Linn County Public Health issued an alert warning that fine particles were dangerous for people with heart or lung disease, and visibility dropped to about two miles as the haze settled over downtown.
It wasn't a one-time fluke. Iowa had already gotten a preview in the summer of 2021, when smoke from wildfires burning in the western US and Canada pushed air quality alerts across the state in late July and early August. Cedar Rapids sits on flat land with no mountains or valley walls to trap that smoke, so once a plume moves through it usually clears faster than in a basin city — but while it's overhead, the reading can spike further and faster than almost anything the city's own industry produces.
Telling a smell day from a smoke day matters
A funky evening near the Quaker plant and a genuine wildfire-smoke alert call for different responses, and the difference is worth knowing before either one hits. Grain-plant odor is unpleasant but usually a Good or Moderate AQI day; a Canadian smoke plume like the one in June 2023 is a real spike into Unhealthy or worse, and that's when closing windows and moving workouts indoors actually matters for your lungs, not just your nose.
Because Cedar Rapids does not sit in a valley or bowl, bad air here tends to be a passing event rather than a multi-day trap — but a passing spike can still be severe while it's overhead. Checking the number before you commit to an afternoon outside, especially for kids, older adults, or anyone with asthma, is the difference between guessing from the smell and actually knowing.
Cedar Rapids air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Cedar Rapids right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:10 AM CDT, the air quality in Cedar Rapids, Iowa is AQI 13 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.4 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Cedar Rapids smell like cereal?
The Quaker Oats plant on the Cedar River, now owned by PepsiCo, is recognized by the World Record Academy as the largest cereal plant in the world, and it has been running since 1873. Combined with other grain-processing plants nearby, the smell is real enough that locals have called Cedar Rapids the "City of Five Smells" since the 1970s — though the odor mostly reflects volatile compounds your nose catches, not necessarily a high PM2.5 reading.
What caused Cedar Rapids's worst air quality day on record?
On June 27, 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted into eastern Iowa and pushed Cedar Rapids's AQI to 264, the highest recorded in the city's history and the worst in Iowa that day. Linn County Public Health urged residents with heart or lung conditions to stay indoors until the smoke cleared.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Cedar Rapids, 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 Cedar Rapids
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