Air Quality in Iowa City, Iowa — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Iowa City — with free alerts when wildfire smoke drifts in from hundreds of miles away.
AQI 14 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Iowa City, Iowa is AQI 14 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 2.5 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 7 to 22. 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 Iowa City: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very 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 Iowa City and Coralville, North Liberty, Tiffin, Solon. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Iowa City
The sensors Canairy reads in Iowa City agree right now — all 3 sit in the Good band, a 15-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.6 mi N | 7 | Good |
| 2.6 mi N | 22 | Good |
| 3.0 mi N | 14 | Good |
Iowa City's air is genuinely clean most of the year. The city has no heavy industry to speak of — the University of Iowa and its hospitals are the biggest thing here — and it sits on flat, open farm country with nothing to trap local exhaust the way a mountain valley does. The exception is summer, when smoke from wildfires burning hundreds of miles away in Canada can ride the jet stream south and settle right down to the ground over eastern Iowa.
What Canairy does for Iowa City
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Iowa City: 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 Iowa City or across the country, on one screen.
Iowa City has already lived through this twice
On Monday, June 26, 2023, Iowa City's air quality index read a clean 30. By lunchtime Tuesday it had jumped to 162 — unhealthy — and by 2:30 that afternoon it hit 223, very unhealthy. It was still at 224 the next morning. The National Weather Service said the smoke, blown down from wildfires in Canada, was worse than forecast because it was reaching all the way to the ground instead of staying aloft. Cedar Rapids, 25 miles north, peaked at 264 that day, the highest reading anywhere in the state.
It happened again on July 20, 2026: the Iowa DNR and National Weather Service issued a joint air quality alert as Canadian wildfire smoke pushed Iowa City's AQI to 156, with officials advising sensitive groups to reschedule outdoor plans or wear an N95 mask if they had to be outside. Three years apart, same cause, same pattern — this is now a recognizable part of an Iowa City summer, not a freak occurrence.
Why smoke from 500 miles away still reaches the ground here
Iowa City sits along the Iowa River at around 656 feet elevation, in a landscape of rolling farmland with no mountains or valley walls anywhere nearby. That geography means the city rarely traps its own pollution the way a basin city does — there simply isn't much local exhaust to trap. But flat, open terrain does nothing to stop a plume of wildfire smoke moving overhead from another country entirely.
When a large enough fire sends smoke high into the jet stream, it can travel for days and hundreds of miles before a shift in the upper-level winds pushes it back down to breathing height. That's what happened over eastern Iowa in both June 2023 and July 2026 — clear skies one afternoon, a hazy, particle-heavy sky the next morning, with the source burning a thousand miles to the north.
What actually changes on an alert day
The last time this happened, Iowa City Parks and Recreation cancelled outdoor programming for two straight days while the advisory was in effect, and the Iowa DNR moved its guidance from 'reduce outdoor activity' to 'move activities indoors' as conditions worsened. That's a useful signal: when the city's own parks department starts cancelling camps and practices, the air is past the point of just looking hazy.
Canairy exists so you don't have to wait for that kind of announcement to know your own number. Set a threshold once, and you'll get a plain-English alert — close the windows, skip the run, bring the kids inside — the moment the sensors near your saved places cross it, whether that's from a Canadian fire or anything else.
Iowa City air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Iowa City right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:17 AM CDT, the air quality in Iowa City, Iowa is AQI 14 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.5 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Iowa City get hazy or smoky in summer?
The cause both times it has happened in recent years has been wildfire smoke from Canada, not anything burning locally. On June 27-28, 2023, Iowa City's AQI climbed from a clean 30 to 224 as smoke settled to ground level, with Cedar Rapids peaking at 264 the same day. On July 20, 2026, the Iowa DNR and National Weather Service issued another alert as Canadian smoke pushed the AQI to 156. Iowa City's flat, open geography does nothing to stop a smoke plume moving in from hundreds of miles away.
What was Iowa City's worst air-quality day on record recently?
June 28, 2023, when the AQI was still reading 224 - very unhealthy - at 8 a.m. after Canadian wildfire smoke settled over the region the day before. The Iowa DNR expanded its advice that week from reducing outdoor activity to moving activities indoors entirely, and Iowa City Parks and Recreation cancelled outdoor programming for two days.
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 3 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Iowa City, 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 Iowa City
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