Air Quality in Cheyenne, Wyoming — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Cheyenne — with free alerts when the wind kicks up dust or wildfire smoke drifts in.
AQI 19 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Cheyenne, Wyoming is AQI 19 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 3.5 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 18 to 19. 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 Cheyenne: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a 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 Cheyenne and Laramie, Pine Bluffs, Chugwater, Burns. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Cheyenne
The sensors Canairy reads in Cheyenne agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 1-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4 mi ENE | 19 | Good |
| 3.6 mi NE | 19 | Good |
| 3.9 mi W | 19 | Good |
| 6.8 mi NNE | 18 | Good |
Cheyenne sits on the High Plains in one of the windiest spots in the country, and most days that works in the city's favor — a steady breeze keeps particle pollution from ever building up the way it does in a valley or a basin. The exceptions come from two directions: wind strong enough to whip dust off the surrounding prairie into a genuine dust storm, and wildfire smoke that rides in on that same wind from fires burning in the mountains west of Laramie, across the state line in Colorado, or as far away as Canada.
What Canairy does for Cheyenne
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Cheyenne: 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 Cheyenne or across the country, on one screen.
Cheyenne is one of the windiest cities in America
Cheyenne's average wind speed runs from about 12 to nearly 15 miles an hour depending on the year, consistently placing it among the five or six windiest cities in the country. The wind comes from the city's position on the High Plains at just over 6,000 feet, in a natural corridor where air funnels between the Laramie Range to the west and open prairie to the east, with little to slow it down before it reaches the city.
That wind is usually good news for air quality — it keeps particle pollution from pooling the way it does in calmer, valley-bound cities. But when it turns extreme, it becomes the problem itself. On March 12, 2026, the National Weather Service issued a dust storm warning for Laramie and Albany counties as winds gusted to 60 mph and visibility dropped to near zero, part of a wider High Plains blowing-dust advisory with gusts topping 90 mph and, by some regional reports that week, as high as 109 mph — enough to blow over commercial trucks. Those are the days coarse dust (PM10) spikes in the air, even on a day with no smoke in sight.
Wildfire smoke still finds Cheyenne, even when the fires don't
Cheyenne has no forests of its own, but it sits downwind of country that burns. In September and October 2020, the Mullen Fire tore through more than 176,000 acres of the Medicine Bow National Forest about 28 miles west of Laramie, while Colorado's Cameron Peak Fire burned on the other side of the state line at the same time. Together they buried the region in smoke thick enough that local coverage described Cheyenne and Laramie as looking less like the Wyoming towns everyone knew and more like a movie set, with residents advised to stay indoors.
It doesn't take a fire that close. On September 4, 2025, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality and the Wyoming Department of Health issued an air quality alert covering the entire state, Cheyenne included, for smoke drifting down from wildfires burning in Canada, hundreds of miles north. The alert flagged both ozone and particulate matter and warned kids, older adults, and anyone with a respiratory condition to scale back strenuous outdoor activity until it cleared.
What to actually do when the wind or the smoke turns
The two hazards call for different responses. A high-wind dust event usually clears within a day as the front moves through, so the simplest move is to stay inside and keep windows shut until the gusts die down. Wildfire smoke is slower — once it settles over the city it can sit for days, and it's the fine particles, not the visible haze, that do the damage, so it's worth knowing your number before your throat tells you something is wrong.
That's the gap Canairy is built to close. Instead of waiting for a statewide advisory or a smoky smell to check the sky, you get a plain answer for your own neighborhood, pulled from real sensors near the places you actually saved rather than one reading for the whole state.
Cheyenne air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Cheyenne right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:19 AM MDT, the air quality in Cheyenne, Wyoming is AQI 19 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.5 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is Cheyenne so windy, and is that good or bad for air quality?
Cheyenne sits on the High Plains in a natural wind corridor next to the Laramie Range, and its average wind speed of roughly 12 to 15 mph puts it among the windiest cities in the country. Most days that wind is a good thing - it keeps particle pollution from settling the way it does in calmer, valley-bound cities. But extreme wind events can whip up blowing dust across the surrounding prairie, sometimes triggering dust storm warnings and spiking coarse particulate matter (PM10).
Does wildfire smoke reach Cheyenne?
Yes, even when nothing is burning nearby. The 2020 Mullen Fire west of Laramie and Colorado's Cameron Peak Fire filled the region with smoke for weeks, and in September 2025 Wyoming issued a statewide air quality alert, Cheyenne included, over smoke drifting in from wildfires burning in Canada.
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 Cheyenne, 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 Cheyenne
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