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.

Live Columbia AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Columbia and West Columbia, Cayce, Forest Acres, Lexington.

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.

Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.

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?

This page shows the current AQI for Columbia, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood.

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 AQI level is unhealthy?

Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0-50 is Good and 51-100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups - kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions - and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.

Where does Canairy's Columbia data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Columbia and surrounding Midlands towns, cross-referenced with government monitors and the Google Air Quality API. You can see every sensor behind your numbers on the live map - there's no black box.

Is Canairy free?

Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.