Air Quality in Colorado Springs, Colorado — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Colorado Springs — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 1 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Colorado Springs, Colorado is AQI 1 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 0.1 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 0 to 6. 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 Colorado Springs: 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 Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs, Monument, Fountain, Woodland Park. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Colorado Springs
The sensors Canairy reads in Colorado Springs agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 6-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.2 mi NNW | 6 | Good |
| 3.3 mi SW | 1 | Good |
| 3.8 mi WNW | 0 | Good |
| 5.2 mi WNW | 1 | Good |
| 6.8 mi NNW | 6 | Good |
Colorado Springs sits more than a mile high at the foot of the Front Range, and most days the air here is genuinely good — the city isn't even part of Denver's chronic ozone problem to the north. What changes that is wildfire, and it doesn't have to start far away: some of the most destructive fires in Colorado history have ignited right at the city's own edge, in the ponderosa pine country and grasslands that ring it.
What Canairy does for Colorado Springs
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Colorado Springs: 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 Colorado Springs or across the country, on one screen.
Colorado Springs isn't part of Denver's ozone problem
Colorado's eight-hour ozone nonattainment area covers Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, and Jefferson counties, plus parts of Weld and Larimer — the Denver Metro/North Front Range corridor where summer smog regularly pushes AQI into Moderate and Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups territory. El Paso County, where Colorado Springs sits, is not on that list. Day to day, that shows up as real, measurable relief: about 243 sunny days a year, a semi-arid climate, and none of the trapped brown haze that settles over Denver on hot summer afternoons.
That doesn't mean the air is perfect — ozone and fine particles can still drift down from the Denver metro on north winds, and the city has its own particulate problem the moment wildfire smoke is involved. But the baseline is real: unlike its neighbor 70 miles north, Colorado Springs isn't fighting a chronic summer smog problem, which is exactly why the exceptions — a bad fire season — stand out so sharply here.
Two of Colorado's most destructive fires started at the city's front door
The Waldo Canyon Fire started just four miles northwest of downtown on June 23, 2012, and by the time it was contained on July 10 it had burned 18,247 acres and destroyed 346 homes. On June 26, a record 101-degree day pushed the fire through Queen's Canyon and into the city itself, forcing more than 32,000 people out of Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs, Woodland Park, and the Air Force Academy. Smoke was thick enough that Memorial Health System's emergency room treated adults and children for breathing problems well beyond the evacuation zone.
Less than a year later, on June 11, 2013, the Black Forest Fire ignited about 15 miles north near Highway 83 and Shoup Road. It burned 14,280 acres, destroyed 511 homes, and briefly became the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history — a record it held until the 2021 Marshall Fire near Boulder. Roughly 38,000 residents evacuated, and the smoke plumes were heavy enough that at least one evacuation shelter had to relocate because of the smoke itself.
The Pineries are why this keeps happening here
Black Forest takes its name from the dense stand of ponderosa pine — locally called the Pineries — that spreads across a plateau north of the city at around 7,300 feet. That kind of forest, dry needles and all, is built to burn hot and fast once it catches, which is exactly what happened in 2013. To the east and south of the city, the terrain changes to short-grass prairie, a different fuel that carries fire just as fast in a dry, windy spring.
Both fires made the same point: smoke doesn't wait for flames to reach your neighborhood. In 2012, people who never got an evacuation notice still ended up in the emergency room because of what was in the air that week. That's the reason to check an actual sensor reading on a bad fire day rather than judge it by whether your street is on the evacuation map.
Colorado Springs air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Colorado Springs right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 6:10 AM MDT, the air quality in Colorado Springs, Colorado is AQI 1 — Good — with PM2.5 at 0.1 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did Colorado Springs have such bad air in 2012 and 2013?
Two of Colorado's most destructive wildfires both started at the edge of the city within a year of each other. The Waldo Canyon Fire burned into Colorado Springs itself in June 2012, and the Black Forest Fire destroyed 511 homes just north of the city in June 2013. Both sent thick smoke over neighborhoods well outside the official evacuation zones, which is the pattern worth watching for in any dry, windy fire season since.
Is Colorado Springs' air quality worse than Denver's?
Generally no. El Paso County, where Colorado Springs sits, is not part of the Denver Metro/North Front Range ozone nonattainment area that covers Denver and its closer suburbs, so the city doesn't carry Denver's chronic summer smog problem. The exception is wildfire smoke, which can affect both cities regardless of ozone status whenever a fire is burning nearby or upwind.
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 Colorado Springs, 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 Colorado Springs
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