Air Quality in Halifax, Nova Scotia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Halifax — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 51 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Halifax, Nova Scotia is AQI 51 — Moderate and falling — with PM2.5 at 9.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 26 to 70. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
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 Halifax: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a none 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 Halifax and Dartmouth, Bedford, Lower Sackville, Cole Harbour. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Halifax
The sensors Canairy reads in Halifax are 44 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5 mi WNW | 49 | Good |
| 1.2 mi SSE | 70 | Moderate |
| 6.6 mi NNW | 52 | Moderate |
| 7.1 mi NE | 56 | Moderate |
| 12.6 mi NW | 26 | Good |
Most of the time Halifax breathes clean air off the Atlantic, and the sensors around the city read near the bottom of the scale. The exception is not a distant fire season the way it is for most Canadian cities. On 28 May 2023 a wildfire broke out in the Hammonds Plains and Upper Tantallon communities at the western edge of the municipality. Halifax Regional Fire & Emergency's post-incident analysis records more than 900 hectares burned, 16,400 people evacuated and roughly 200 structures lost, including 151 homes, in what it calls the municipality's most extensive urban interface wildfire.
What Canairy does for Halifax
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Halifax: 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 Halifax or across the country, on one screen.
The 2023 fire started at the edge of the subdivisions
Most Canadian cities get their smoke second-hand, blown in from fires hundreds of kilometres away. Halifax's worst air in living memory came from a fire in its own suburbs, in the neighbourhoods off Highway 103. It was not the only one burning that spring. The province's independent after-action review of the 2023 season, prepared by Calian for the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables, records that the Barrington Lake fire in Shelburne County became the largest wildfire in Nova Scotia's recorded history, and that between them the Barrington Lake and Tantallon fires damaged more than 25,000 hectares and destroyed more than 200 homes. The Provincial Wildfire Coordination Centre was activated on 28 May and the fires were well under control by 11 June 2023.
What followed is a fairly practical list. An after-action report completed in October 2023 made nine recommendations and was accepted by Regional Council on 28 November 2023. A Voluntary Vulnerable Persons Registry launched in November 2023 for residents who need extra help during an emergency. In April 2024 the municipality and the province installed three FireScout wildfire-detection cameras at Musquodoboit Harbour, Middle Sackville and Hammonds Plains, giving a 360-degree view and round-the-clock watch for smoke, and Halifax Regional Fire & Emergency hired a Wildfire Mitigation Program Manager the same month. Council also asked staff to work out emergency-only egress routes from the Westwood Hills subdivision onto Highway 103, having watched what happened when a single way out was not enough.
Three official stations, and what they cannot tell you
Environment Canada publishes the Air Quality Health Index for Halifax from three stations: Halifax, Halifax Downtown, and Halifax - Lake Major. The index here is a joint effort between Environment Canada, Health Canada, Nova Scotia Environment and the Nova Scotia Department of Health and Wellness, working with the Lung Association of Nova Scotia and Clean Nova Scotia. Environment Canada attaches a candid footnote to the live numbers: the supporting data arrives in real time, which precludes detailed quality control, and users are told not to treat current conditions as publication-grade.
Three stations across a municipality this large is a coarse picture, and it is coarsest in exactly the places where the 2023 fire did its damage, out past Bedford and Hammonds Plains where the subdivisions meet the woods. Nova Scotia's wildfire risk season runs from 15 March to 15 October, and during it the province sets a daily burn restriction by county, with no domestic brush burning or campfires permitted between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. even on the least restricted days. The sensors on the map below are what fill the space between the three official monitors when something is burning nearby.
Halifax air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Halifax right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 12:00 PM ADT, the air quality in Halifax, Nova Scotia is AQI 51 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 9.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why is there smoke in Halifax today?
Most days there is not, and that is the honest answer. Halifax sits on the open Atlantic and its air is usually clean. When smoke does show up it is nearly always a wildfire, either in the province or blown in from fires much further west. The local version is real here in a way it is not in most Canadian cities: the Upper Tantallon and Hammonds Plains fire on 28 May 2023 burned more than 900 hectares at the municipality's western edge. Nova Scotia's wildfire risk season runs from 15 March to 15 October, and the province publishes a daily county-by-county burn restriction during it.
Canada reports the AQHI, so why does this page show a different number?
Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes the Air Quality Health Index, a 1 to 10+ scale built from three pollutants measured together: fine particulate matter, ground-level ozone and nitrogen dioxide. PurpleAir sensors measure fine particulate matter only, so an AQHI cannot honestly be calculated from them. This page shows the US EPA AQI instead, which is derived from PM2.5 directly and is what most air quality apps use. It is not an AQHI and Canairy does not present it as one. For the official AQHI for Halifax, Environment Canada and Nova Scotia Environment are the sources, reporting from the Halifax, Halifax Downtown and Halifax - Lake Major stations.
Could another fire like Upper Tantallon happen here?
The municipality has treated that as a when rather than an if. Since 2023 it has installed three FireScout smoke-detection cameras at Musquodoboit Harbour, Middle Sackville and Hammonds Plains, hired a dedicated Wildfire Mitigation Program Manager, launched a registry for residents who would need help evacuating, and studied emergency egress options for the Westwood Hills subdivision. Residents are pointed at the FireSmart program for reducing risk around their own homes. If a fire does start close by, the first sign for most people is smoke, which is why a sensor near your own street is worth watching in fire season.
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 Halifax, 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
Go deeper
Air quality near Halifax
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