Air Quality in Chico, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Chico — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 25 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Chico, California is AQI 25 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 4.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 24 to 29. 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 Chico: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a very low 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 Chico and Paradise, Durham, Oroville, Orland. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Chico
The sensors Canairy reads in Chico agree right now — all 5 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5 mi SSE | 25 | Good |
| 1.5 mi NNE | 29 | Good |
| 2.8 mi ENE | 24 | Good |
| 3.0 mi NNE | 25 | Good |
| 3.2 mi E | 29 | Good |
Chico usually breathes clean valley air, but it sits at the doorstep of some of the worst wildfire smoke California has ever recorded. The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, minutes to the east, pushed Chico's air quality index to 547 and left it among the most polluted places on Earth for days; the North Complex followed in 2020, and the Park Fire ignited in Chico's own Upper Bidwell Park in 2024. Between fire seasons, winter inversions and wood smoke are the quieter, recurring problem.
What Canairy does for Chico
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Chico: 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 Chico or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Chico is doing next
| When | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|
| Today | Good | ozone |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Chico reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
Chico is where California's worst fires start and where their smoke lands
Paradise sits about fifteen miles east of Chico, and when the Camp Fire burned it to the ground in November 2018, Chico became the closest air monitor to the disaster. The readings were staggering: an AQI of 547, a daily-average PM2.5 of 412 micrograms per cubic meter, nearly twelve times the federal standard, and a lead spike fifty times above normal as thousands of homes burned. A California Air Resources Board scientist called the metal levels in Chico's air 'alarming' and 'new territory' for exposure.
It was not a one-time event. The North Complex fire pushed into Butte County in September 2020 and drove Chico's index between 171 and 722, with nearby Oroville reading over 1,000. Then in July 2024 the Park Fire started inside Chico's own Upper Bidwell Park, near Alligator Hole, and grew into the fourth-largest wildfire in state history at more than 429,000 acres. For Chico, wildfire smoke is not a distant threat carried in on the wind; it is often burning right next door.
The valley traps the smoke that the foothills don't stop
Chico sits in the northern Sacramento Valley, right where the flat farmland meets the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills. When smoke rolls off a fire in the mountains, the terrain funnels it down onto the valley floor, and there is nowhere for it to easily escape. That is why a fire burning miles away in Plumas or Tehama County can still leave Chico under a thick haze for days.
Winter makes it worse. Cold, stable air settles into the valley and forms a temperature inversion, a lid of warm air overhead that traps everything below it near the ground. The Butte County Air Quality Management District lists fine particulate matter and ozone as the county's two pollutants of most concern, and notes that winter PM2.5 is made worse by these strong inversions. On a still, cold night, the smoke and pollution simply pool and stay.
Wood stoves in winter and rice fields in fall add their own smoke
Not all of Chico's bad air comes from wildfire. In winter, residential wood smoke from stoves and fireplaces is a major source of the fine particles that inversions trap overhead. That is why Chico restricts wood burning from November through the end of February on days when the air district issues a no-burn advisory under its Check Before You Light program, the local version of the region's Check Before You Burn rules.
In fall, the surrounding rice country adds agricultural burning to the mix. Growers across the Sacramento Valley burn rice straw to control disease, but only on permissive burn days when the weather can disperse the smoke, and with tighter limits from mid-September through October when the air is most prone to stagnation. On a bad-air day in Chico, the haze you are looking at could be a wildfire, a neighbor's fireplace, or a burning field miles away, and the number on your sensor is what tells you it is time to close the windows.
Chico air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Chico right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 11:03 AM PDT, the air quality in Chico, California is AQI 25 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does the air in Chico get so bad during wildfires?
Chico sits in the northern Sacramento Valley at the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills, and smoke from fires in the surrounding mountains funnels down onto the valley floor with nowhere to escape. Because Paradise and the fire-prone foothills are minutes to the east, Chico is often close to where fires start. During the 2018 Camp Fire its AQI hit 547, and the Park Fire of 2024 ignited in Chico's own Upper Bidwell Park.
When is wood burning restricted in Chico?
From November 1 through the end of February, wood burning within the Chico city limits is restricted on days the Butte County Air Quality Management District issues a no-burn advisory under its Check Before You Light program. Wood smoke is one of the biggest sources of fine particle pollution in winter, when temperature inversions trap it close to the ground.
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 Chico, 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
Go deeper
Air quality near Chico
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