Air Quality in Columbia, South Carolina — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Columbia — with free alerts when Midlands ozone or wildfire smoke moves in.
AQI 72 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Columbia, South Carolina is AQI 72 — Moderate and rising — with PM2.5 at 20.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 68 to 76. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.4 times 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 Columbia: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a moderate 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 Columbia and West Columbia, Cayce, Forest Acres, Lexington. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Columbia
The sensors Canairy reads in Columbia agree right now — all 4 sit in the Moderate band, a 8-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 mi ENE | 68 | Moderate |
| 8.1 mi W | 72 | Moderate |
| 14.6 mi NE | 72 | Moderate |
| 17.0 mi SE | 76 | Moderate |
For most of the year, Columbia's air is unremarkable in the best sense — the Midlands doesn't carry the year-round smog or heavy industry of a bigger metro. The real story shows up on the hottest, stillest days of summer, when heat and tailpipe exhaust cook up ground-level ozone across the region, and on the rare days when smoke from fires burning hundreds or even thousands of miles away — most memorably Canadian wildfires in June 2023 — drifts down and settles over the city.
What Canairy does for Columbia
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Columbia: 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 Columbia or across the country, on one screen.
Summer is Columbia's ozone season, and the Midlands has a real history with it
Ground-level ozone forms when vehicle exhaust and other emissions cook in strong sun and heat, and Columbia's humid subtropical summers — regularly in the mid-90s, with a record 113°F set on June 29, 2012 — come close to ideal conditions for it. The state's Bureau of Air Quality issues a daily ground-level ozone forecast for the Central Midlands region every day from April 1 through September 30, and calls a Code Orange or worse 'ozone action day' when conditions are expected to turn unhealthy for sensitive groups.
This isn't a hypothetical risk for Richland County. Under the tighter 1997 federal ozone standard, the Columbia area was one of three South Carolina regions flagged for likely non-attainment by 2004. Richland County signed an Early Action Compact in 2002, worked with large local employers like Palmetto Health to cut emissions, and joined the national Cool Counties campaign — and it worked: at the end of 2011, DHEC notified the county it had avoided a federal non-attainment designation, the kind of label that brings stricter, costlier permitting rules for local industry and construction.
Malfunction Junction and the traffic that feeds ozone season
A lot of the exhaust that turns into summer ozone comes from one place: the tangle of Interstates 20, 26, and 126 just northwest of downtown that locals call Malfunction Junction. It's one of the most congested and collision-prone interchanges in the state — three of the five most dangerous intersections in Lexington County sit at or near it, and the county logged more than 8,000 crashes in 2023 alone.
The state is in the middle of fixing it. Carolina Crossroads, a roughly $1.7 billion project and the largest road construction undertaking in South Carolina history, has been rebuilding the interchange in phases since 2021, with the biggest work still years away. Until it's finished, the idling and stop-and-go traffic through the junction stays one of the most concentrated, everyday sources of vehicle emissions in the Midlands.
Smoke doesn't have to start here to reach here
Columbia has no wildfire season of its own to speak of, but it isn't immune to smoke from fires that start somewhere else. In June 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in eastern and western Canada traveled far enough south that DHEC issued an Air Quality Alert covering 30 counties across the northern half of South Carolina, including Richland and Lexington — one of the first times many Midlands residents had seen genuinely hazy, wildfire-tinted skies over the city.
Closer to home, Congaree National Park, about 20 miles southeast of downtown, regularly runs prescribed burns across its bottomland forest to reduce fuel and restore habitat — burns like the roughly 900 acres treated in April 2025 sent visible smoke drifting across the Midlands for a few days at a stretch. Those burns are managed and announced in advance, but it's still smoke in the air over the city, which is exactly the kind of short-term spike Canairy is built to flag.
Columbia air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Columbia right now?
As of September 15, 2026 at 2:05 AM EDT, the air quality in Columbia, South Carolina is AQI 72 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 20.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Columbia get ozone alerts in the summer?
Ground-level ozone forms when vehicle exhaust and other emissions react in strong heat and sunlight, and Columbia's hot, humid summers are well suited to it. The state's Bureau of Air Quality issues a daily ozone forecast for the Central Midlands from April through September and calls a Code Orange or worse ozone action day when conditions turn unhealthy for sensitive groups — a risk serious enough that Richland County spent the early 2000s working to avoid a federal ozone non-attainment designation.
Does wildfire smoke ever reach Columbia?
Yes, though it almost never starts here. In June 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in Canada traveled far enough south that the state issued an Air Quality Alert covering Richland and Lexington counties along with 28 others. Closer to home, prescribed burns at Congaree National Park, about 20 miles southeast of the city, occasionally send visible smoke drifting into the Midlands for a few days at a time.
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 Columbia, 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 Columbia
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