Air Quality in Gillette, Wyoming — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Gillette — with free alerts when the wind kicks up dust across the Powder River Basin.
AQI 49 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Gillette, Wyoming is AQI 49 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 8.8 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. 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 Gillette: 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 Gillette and Wright, Moorcroft, Rozet, Sundance. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Most of the year, Gillette's air is unremarkable — this is high, dry, sparsely populated Wyoming prairie, not a wildfire-prone forest corridor. The real story here is wind: Campbell County sits in the open Powder River Basin between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills, and when a strong wind event blows through, it can kick up enough dust to swing the AQI hard, which is why Wyoming's Department of Environmental Quality has run a dedicated PM10 monitor in town since 1991.
What Canairy does for Gillette
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Gillette: 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.
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Home, work, the kids' school — across Gillette or across the country, on one screen.
Why Gillette gets blowing-dust days
Gillette sits at about 4,554 feet in the Powder River Basin, an open, largely treeless stretch of high plains with the Bighorn Mountains to the west and the Black Hills to the east — geography with nothing to slow the wind down. When a strong front moves through, gusts of 40 to 60 mph are common, and Wyoming DEQ has issued blowing-dust health advisories for the Powder River Basin during events with west winds reported up to 100 mph.
The state takes this seriously enough to run the Gillette SLAMS station, a PM10 monitor that has tracked coarse dust particles in town since 1991 — one of the longer-running monitoring records of its kind in Wyoming. DEQ's High Wind Mitigation Plan and its blowing-dust health brochure exist specifically because Campbell County's flat, dry terrain turns an ordinary windy day into a genuine air-quality event, which surprises a lot of people who assume a place with no wildfire reputation has nothing to watch.
The coal mines are part of the air here too
Campbell County produces more coal than any other county in the United States, and the mines start close to Gillette's edge. Black Thunder, down near Wright about 40 miles south, has been described as the single most productive coal mine in the country; Eagle Butte and several other surface mines operate even nearer to town. Draglines and haul trucks strip overburden and move rock across large open pits, and fugitive dust from haul roads and exposed spoil piles is a routine, permitted part of that work, not an accident.
Mine operators are required to run dust-control measures like water trucks and haul-road speed limits, and part of what DEQ's monitoring network in Gillette exists for is confirming that dust stays within permit limits. It's a different kind of pollution story than most cities Canairy covers — less one dramatic event, more a steady background level that occasionally spikes on the same high-wind days that already sting your eyes.
Summer can still bring smoke, just less predictably
Gillette isn't a forested mountain town, but the grass and sagebrush of the Powder River Basin burn fast in a dry summer, and fires on private, state, and BLM land within Campbell County itself have triggered air-quality alerts in recent years, alongside smoke that drifts in from larger fires burning in the Bighorns, the Black Hills, or farther west.
These smoke events are shorter and less predictable than the wind-driven dust days, but they matter for the same reason: a handful of weeks each summer can change Gillette's air fast, even though the rest of the year it's unremarkable in the best possible sense.
Gillette air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Gillette right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 2:00 PM MDT, the air quality in Gillette, Wyoming is AQI 49 — Good — with PM2.5 at 8.8 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Gillette get so much blowing dust?
Gillette sits in the open Powder River Basin between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills, with nothing to slow the wind down. High-wind events with gusts of 40 to 60 mph, sometimes more, are common enough that Wyoming's DEQ issues blowing-dust health advisories and has run a dedicated PM10 monitor in town since 1991.
Do the coal mines around Gillette affect the air quality?
Yes, to a degree. Campbell County produces more coal than any other county in the US, and surface mines like Black Thunder near Wright and Eagle Butte just outside Gillette generate fugitive dust from haul roads and exposed pits as a routine part of permitted operations. Mine operators run water trucks and other dust controls, and DEQ's monitoring network helps confirm dust stays within permit limits.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Gillette, 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 Gillette
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