Air Quality in Glendale, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Glendale — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 24 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Glendale, California is AQI 24 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 4.4 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 20 to 52. 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 Glendale: weeds 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 Glendale and Montrose, La Crescenta, Burbank, Eagle Rock, Atwater Village, La Cañada Flintridge. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Glendale
The sensors Canairy reads in Glendale are 32 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4 mi NW | 46 | Good |
| 2.8 mi ESE | 52 | Moderate |
| 3.3 mi ENE | 20 | Good |
| 3.4 mi SW | 22 | Good |
| 5.5 mi NW | 27 | Good |
Glendale is built up against a mountain range and threaded by freeways, and both facts show up in the air. The city sits about 10 miles north of downtown Los Angeles at an elevation of 522 feet, and it lies primarily in the Verdugo Mountains region with only a small portion in the San Fernando Valley. Interstate 5 runs along the west side, State Route 134 crosses east to west, and State Route 2 — the Glendale Freeway — joins SR-134 right at the Los Angeles-Glendale line. Above all of that, the Verdugos rise to 3,126 feet at Verdugo Peak: eight miles long and a little over three miles wide, an island of brush surrounded on every side by houses.
What Canairy does for Glendale
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Glendale: 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 Glendale or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Glendale is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 58 | Moderate | ozone |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the E San Fernando Vly 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.
The mountains at the top of town
The Verdugo Mountains are the reason Glendale's air behaves differently from the flat parts of the basin. The range marks where the borders of the San Gabriel Valley and the San Fernando Valley meet, and its southern front forms part of the northeastern edge of the San Fernando Valley. The Crescenta Valley sits in the gap between the Verdugos and the San Gabriel Mountains a mile or two north — a narrow trough that catches whatever the wind pushes into it. Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge all touch the range, with La Crescenta-Montrose and Sunland-Tujunga adjoining it.
The La Tuna Fire showed what that means in practice. It began shortly before 1:30 p.m. on 1 September 2017 in La Tuna Canyon and burned 7,194 acres across the Verdugos before containment on 9 September, destroying five residences and five outbuildings and forcing the evacuation of more than 300 homes in Burbank, Glendale and Sunland-Tujunga. Interstate 210 was closed between Lowell Avenue and Sunland Boulevard and did not fully reopen until Monday 4 September. On 2 September, South Coast AQMD issued a smoke advisory for Burbank and the eastern San Fernando Valley, telling residents to stay indoors as the smoke became trapped beneath an atmospheric inversion. That last part is the recurring problem: the smoke does not simply blow through.
Three freeways and an old power plant
Traffic is the everyday, unglamorous half of Glendale's air. I-5 hugs the western boundary near the Los Angeles River's Glendale Narrows, SR-134 runs the width of the city, and SR-2 comes down out of the foothills to meet it. Vehicle exhaust is what feeds the photochemical reaction that makes ozone on hot afternoons, and it is also the main local source of the fine particles that a PurpleAir sensor picks up on a day with no fire anywhere. How close you are to one of those corridors changes your numbers more than most people expect, which is why a citywide average is less useful here than a reading from a sensor on your own street.
Glendale also generates a share of its own electricity inside the city. The Grayson Power Plant, run by Glendale Water and Power at the intersection of Fairmont Avenue and San Fernando Road, has been operating since 1941, and the majority of its equipment and facilities were completed between 1941 and 1977. The city's repowering project would replace those units — all except Unit 9, built in 2003 — with a combination of new combined-cycle and simple-cycle natural gas turbines, taking capacity from 238 MW to 260 MW. In December 2024 the California Court of Appeal upheld the city's final environmental impact report for the project.
January 2025, from eight miles away
Glendale did not burn in January 2025, and it still spent a week living in the smoke. The Eaton Fire started on the evening of 7 January in Eaton Canyon, roughly eight miles east of Glendale, and went on to burn 14,021 acres. Santa Ana gusts hit 100 mph at Mount Lukens in the eastern San Gabriels, directly upwind, and smoke from the fire moved into central and western Los Angeles, reaching communities far from the burn area. Air quality index readings across the region climbed past 200 into the Very Unhealthy category.
Glendale Unified School District closed through Friday 10 January, with officials citing the accessibility of roadways and air quality. Los Angeles County Public Health extended its smoke advisory through 5 p.m. on Saturday 11 January and gave the guidance that holds for any bad-air day here: close windows and doors, run air conditioning on recirculate, use a HEPA air purifier, limit physical exertion indoors and out, and wear an N95 or P100 mask if you have to go outside. Children, older adults, pregnant people and anyone with a respiratory or heart condition were told to stay indoors as much as possible.
Glendale air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Glendale right now?
As of September 11, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Glendale, California is AQI 24 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.4 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Glendale today?
Usually a fire somewhere in the ranges around the basin, and Glendale's position between the Verdugos and the San Gabriels means the smoke tends to settle rather than pass through. The La Tuna Fire in September 2017 burned 7,194 acres in the Verdugo Mountains and prompted a South Coast AQMD smoke advisory on 2 September for Burbank and the eastern San Fernando Valley, with residents told to stay indoors because an atmospheric inversion had trapped the smoke close to the ground. In January 2025 the Eaton Fire burned about eight miles east and pushed smoke across central and western Los Angeles, with regional AQI readings passing 200.
Does living near the 5, the 134 or the 2 affect my air?
Proximity to a busy freeway is one of the clearest local influences on the air you breathe. Vehicle exhaust supplies both the fine particles a sensor measures directly and the ingredients for ozone, which forms on hot, sunny afternoons. Glendale has I-5 along its western edge, SR-134 running across it, and SR-2 dropping in from the foothills to meet SR-134 at the Los Angeles-Glendale line. The practical answer is not to guess: put a sensor reading in front of you for the block you live on rather than relying on a citywide figure.
Are the Verdugo Mountains a wildfire risk for Glendale?
The range is an eight-mile-long, three-mile-wide stretch of brush completely surrounded by urban development, and Glendale is one of four cities that touch it. The La Tuna Fire of 1 September 2017 burned 7,194 acres there before it was contained on 9 September, destroyed five residences and five outbuildings, closed Interstate 210 between Lowell Avenue and Sunland Boulevard, and forced more than 300 homes in Burbank, Glendale and Sunland-Tujunga to evacuate. It is also worth knowing the range has burned before: fires swept the Verdugo Mountains, San Rafael Hills and Chevy Chase in 1964.
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 Glendale, 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 Glendale
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