Air Quality in Grand Forks, North Dakota — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Grand Forks — with free alerts the moment smoke drifts down from Canada.
AQI 9 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Grand Forks, North Dakota is AQI 9 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 1.7 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 Grand Forks: 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 Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, Thompson, Larimore, Emerado. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Grand Forks sits in one of the flattest, most wide-open landscapes in North America, and most days its air matches that description — clean and unremarkable, well inside the Good range. The exception is wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada, which has pushed the Red River Valley into unhealthy territory in recent summers, including a rare statewide smoke event in May 2023 and a genuinely bad stretch in July 2021.
What Canairy does for Grand Forks
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Grand Forks: 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 Grand Forks or across the country, on one screen.
Grand Forks breathes clean air until Canada's forests catch fire
The pattern has repeated in back-to-back years. On May 16-18, 2023, smoke drifting down from wildfires burning in Canada blanketed the entire state of North Dakota at once — a North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality staffer with 25 years on the job called it an exceptionally rare event. Weeks later, on June 14, 2023, smoke returned and pushed air quality into the red "unhealthy for everyone" category across Polk County, Minnesota, which includes East Grand Forks just across the river; officials advised residents to close windows, switch air conditioning to recirculate, and limit time outside.
It isn't a one-year story. In July 2021, smoke from wildfires burning in northern Canada, Oregon, Wyoming, and Montana settled over the Red River Valley for days, and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency issued alerts covering Moorhead, Bemidji, Roseau, and East Grand Forks, with a brief spell reaching "very unhealthy" on July 21. None of those fires were anywhere near Grand Forks — the smoke arrived anyway, riding the wind for days after the flames themselves were old news.
The flattest ground on the continent doesn't stop smoke — it just lets it move through
Grand Forks sits at the bottom of what was once Glacial Lake Agassiz, an ice-age lake that left behind the Red River Valley — one of the flattest stretches of land in North America, with no hills or mountains nearby to block or trap the wind. That's a very different setup from a California valley city, where surrounding peaks can pen smoke in for a week; here, a big smoke event tends to arrive as one broad mass moving across the whole region at once, which is exactly why the DEQ described the May 2023 smoke as covering the entire state rather than one city or county.
The city is also only about 76 miles south of the Canadian border at Pembina, right on the route smoke takes down from Manitoba and Saskatchewan's boreal forests. That proximity means Grand Forks is often among the first US cities to catch a plume that started burning in another country days earlier. But "the whole region" still isn't "your yard" — smoke can sit thicker near the low ground along the Red River and Red Lake River than on higher ground a few blocks away, which is why Canairy reads sensors placed around the city rather than leaning on one regional number.
What actually helps on a smoke day in Grand Forks
Because good air is the norm here, it's easy to get caught off guard when a smoke advisory hits — especially for kids playing outdoor summer sports, UND students walking to class, or anyone with asthma or a heart condition. Check the AQI before committing to a few hours outside, not after your eyes start to sting. Close windows and switch the air conditioner to recirculate before the smoke smell fills the house — it's much harder to clear smoke out of indoor air than to keep it from getting in.
These events can also develop fast — clear skies one afternoon, a haze advisory by the next morning — so checking a live source matters more here than in places where bad air builds up slowly. Set a threshold in Canairy once, and it will tell you the moment the air over Grand Forks crosses it, and the moment it clears again.
Grand Forks air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Grand Forks right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:09 AM CDT, the air quality in Grand Forks, North Dakota is AQI 9 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.7 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Grand Forks get smoky some summers?
Grand Forks sits about 76 miles south of the Canadian border, directly downwind of Manitoba and Saskatchewan's boreal forests. When those forests burn, the smoke has nothing to slow it down across the flat, open Red River Valley. It happened on a large scale in May and June 2023 and again in July 2021, each time pushing the region's air into unhealthy territory for days at a time.
How close is Grand Forks to the wildfires that cause its smoky air?
Often hundreds of miles. The smoke that reaches Grand Forks usually starts in Canadian boreal forests well north of the Pembina border crossing, about 76 miles away, or even farther west in Montana or the Pacific Northwest. Distance doesn't protect the city — smoke can ride the wind for days after a fire starts and still arrive thick enough to push the AQI into unhealthy ranges.
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 Grand Forks, 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 Grand Forks
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