Air Quality in Clovis, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Clovis — with free alerts the moment Sierra smoke reaches the valley floor.
AQI 22 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Clovis, California is AQI 22 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 4.0 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 19 to 44. 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 Clovis: 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 Clovis and Fresno, Sanger, Prather, Madera. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Clovis
The sensors Canairy reads in Clovis 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 mi WSW | 44 | Good |
| 3.5 mi E | 22 | Good |
| 3.6 mi NW | 19 | Good |
| 5.8 mi NW | 26 | Good |
Clovis sits where the San Joaquin Valley floor starts to tilt up into the Sierra foothills, about six miles northeast of downtown Fresno. Most of the year the air here is unremarkable, and it has been improving: in 2025 the Valley Air District logged only five Unhealthy days across all eight of its counties, down from more than a hundred a decade earlier, and for the first time every federal reference monitor in the Valley came in under the 24-hour PM2.5 standard. Two things still break that pattern. Late summer and fall, a fire in the Sierra National Forest sends smoke down the Highway 168 corridor into town. And in midwinter, cold air settles over the Valley and holds a few days' worth of exhaust and wood smoke in place.
What Canairy does for Clovis
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Clovis: 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 Clovis or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Clovis is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 101 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | ozone |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Fresno 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.
The smoke usually comes down Highway 168
Highway 168 leaves Fresno as the Sierra Freeway, runs through Clovis, then narrows to Tollhouse Road past Shepherd Avenue and climbs into the mountains toward Shaver Lake and Huntington Lake. That is also the country that burns. The Creek Fire started on the evening of September 4, 2020 in the Big Creek drainage, and roughly eighteen hours later produced a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that was one of the largest such events ever recorded in North America. It burned 379,895 acres and 856 structures, and was not fully contained until December 24 — 112 days later.
It is not a one-off. The Garnet Fire, started by lightning on August 24, 2025, burned through the same Sierra National Forest above Clovis; by early September it had passed 54,000 acres, and it came close enough to the McKinley Grove that crews ran sprinklers around the giant sequoias. On August 28 that year the Valley Air District warned that smoke could reach the Valley floor through the weekend and told residents to stay indoors, build a clean-air room, or use one of its Clean Air Centers.
What the Clovis monitor recorded in 2020
The Air District operates a reference monitoring station in Clovis, on North Villa Avenue, measuring PM2.5 and ozone. During the Creek Fire the 24-hour PM2.5 average in Clovis, Fresno and Madera reached roughly 200 micrograms per cubic meter — five to six times the federal 24-hour standard of 35 — and on September 14, 2020, the worst day, readings in Clovis and Madera went over 300. From mid-August to mid-October that year at least one Valley town broke the federal standard on nearly every single day, and on ten separate days the entire Valley was unhealthy at once.
The reason is geography. The Valley is walled in on three sides by mountains, so smoke pools on the floor instead of blowing out. As the District's director of air quality science put it afterward, the levels themselves were not unprecedented — what was different in 2020 was seeing them across the whole San Joaquin Valley at the same time.
Winter is a different problem
From November 1 through the end of February the Air District runs Check Before You Burn under Rule 4901. The call is made county by county, so Clovis follows the Fresno County declaration. There are three levels: no burning at all, midnight to midnight, with fines for violations; no burning unless you have registered an EPA-certified or pellet-fueled device with the District; and burning discouraged, where seasoned dry firewood is allowed but trash and plastics never are. Unregistered wood stoves, open fireplaces and outdoor fire pits stay off-limits on curtailment days.
The wider picture stays hard. In the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air, built on 2022 to 2024 data, the Fresno metro area — which includes Clovis — ranked fourth worst in the nation for year-round particle pollution, fifth for ozone with 54.5 high-ozone days a year, and sixth for short-term particle pollution. The same report recorded Fresno posting some of its lowest annual particle levels on record. Both things are true at once.
Clovis air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Clovis right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 5:09 AM PDT, the air quality in Clovis, California is AQI 22 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.0 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Clovis today?
Most often it is a wildfire in the Sierra National Forest east of town, with smoke drawn down the canyons and settling on the Valley floor — that is what happened with the Creek Fire in 2020 and the Garnet Fire in 2025. In winter it is more likely residential wood smoke on a stagnant night, which is why the Air District runs Check Before You Burn from November through February. The Valley Air District's own rule of thumb is that if you can smell smoke and see ash, you are being affected by poor air quality. This page shows what the sensors nearest you are reading right now, rather than a single citywide number.
Can I use my fireplace in Clovis tonight?
Between November 1 and the end of February, that depends on the day. The Air District declares a burn status for Fresno County each day under Rule 4901. On a no-burn day, solid-fuel burning is prohibited midnight to midnight and violations carry fines. On a no-burning-unless-registered day, only a device you have registered with the District — EPA-certified or pellet-fueled — may be used. Open fireplaces, unregistered stoves and outdoor fire pits are not allowed on curtailment days at all. Check the District's daily declaration before you light anything.
Is the air in Clovis any better than Fresno's?
They share the same airshed, and the American Lung Association ranks them together as one metro area. Clovis does have its own reference monitor on North Villa Avenue, and on a given hour the reading there can differ from one across Fresno — smoke plumes and inversions are not evenly spread. But there is no basis for saying Clovis is meaningfully cleaner as a rule. What is worth watching is the sensor nearest you, not the city average.
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 Clovis, 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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