Air Quality in Eugene, Oregon — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Eugene — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 6 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Eugene, Oregon is AQI 6 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 1.0 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 14. 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 Eugene: weeds 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 Eugene and Springfield, Veneta, Junction City, Cottage Grove. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Eugene
The sensors Canairy reads in Eugene agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 13-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.5 mi SSW | 1 | Good |
| 1.7 mi SSE | 6 | Good |
| 2.1 mi SE | 8 | Good |
| 2.8 mi SSW | 3 | Good |
| 3.7 mi ESE | 14 | Good |
Eugene sits at the south end of the Willamette Valley, a low bowl ringed by the Coast Range and the Cascades that tends to hold whatever gets into the air. In wildfire season that means smoke drifting down the McKenzie and other river corridors from Cascade fires, and in winter it means wood smoke pooling under cold inversions. The city's worst stretch came in September 2020, when smoke from the Holiday Farm Fire and other blazes turned the air hazardous for days.
What Canairy does for Eugene
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Eugene: 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 Eugene or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Eugene is doing next
| When | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|
| Today | Good | ozone |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Eugene and Springfield 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.
September 2020 was the smokiest air Eugene had ever measured
The Holiday Farm Fire broke out on September 7, 2020, when fallen power lines ignited the McKenzie River corridor east of Eugene. It went on to burn more than 173,000 acres and became one of the largest fires in Oregon history. Its smoke, joined by plumes from the Lionshead and Beachie Creek fires further north, poured down into the Willamette Valley and settled over the city.
On Labor Day the air started out in the green, healthy range and ended the day purple, or hazardous, as those plumes converged. Eugene stayed at very unhealthy or worse for three days straight, with the AQI averaging 384 on September 8 and 331 on September 9. Across Lane County the reading peaked at 494, the highest since the agency began monitoring in 1968.
Winter wood smoke is the other half of the story
Eugene's air problems are not only a summer thing. On cold, still winter nights the valley behaves like a pot with a lid on it, and a temperature inversion traps everything under a layer of warm air overhead. Smoke from wood stoves and fireplaces has nowhere to go, so it builds up close to the ground where people breathe it. Wood combustion is the single biggest cause of wintertime air pollution in Lane County.
When those conditions set in, the Lane Regional Air Protection Agency issues home wood heating advisories, including red advisories that ask residents to stop burning wood entirely until the air clears. Nearby Oakridge, tucked in a narrow valley up the middle fork of the Willamette, has some of the worst wood-smoke and inversion problems in the country and has been a federal nonattainment area for particle pollution since 1987.
Smoke season now shows up most summers
The 2020 fires were the extreme, but smoky summers have become a recurring feature rather than a rare event. The 2022 Cedar Creek Fire was Oregon's second-largest that year, the 2023 Lookout Fire east of Springfield forced evacuations, and in 2024 a grass fire near Oakridge put out enough smoke to close local businesses. By one estimate, roughly 85 percent of the pollution in the Lane County airshed now comes from wildfire.
The valley's geography is what makes each of these events linger. Smoke that drifts in from the Cascades or from southern Oregon settles at the bottom of the bowl and can sit for days until a weather change flushes it out. That is why an air-quality reading in Eugene can stay poor long after a distant fire is contained, and why it pays to watch the sensors near you rather than assume the smoke has passed.
Eugene air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Eugene right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Eugene, Oregon is AQI 6 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.0 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Eugene's air get smoky in winter and not just during fire season?
On cold, still winter nights the southern Willamette Valley traps a layer of cool air near the ground under warmer air above, an inversion that holds smoke in place. Wood stoves and fireplaces are the biggest source of that wintertime pollution in Lane County, which is why the Lane Regional Air Protection Agency issues home wood heating advisories, sometimes asking people to stop burning wood entirely until the air clears.
How bad did Eugene's air get during the 2020 wildfires?
Very bad. During the Holiday Farm Fire in September 2020, Eugene held at very unhealthy or worse for three days straight, with the AQI averaging 384 on September 8 and 331 on September 9, both in the hazardous range. Lane County as a whole peaked at 494, the highest reading since monitoring began in 1968.
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 Eugene, 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 Eugene
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