Air Quality in Irvine, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Irvine — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 27 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Irvine, California is AQI 27 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 4.9 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 8 to 27. 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 Irvine: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a low 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 Irvine and Tustin, Lake Forest, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Irvine
The sensors Canairy reads in Irvine agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 19-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.7 mi N | 27 | Good |
| 4.0 mi WSW | 26 | Good |
| 5.9 mi ENE | 8 | Good |
| 6.5 mi NE | 27 | Good |
Most of the year Irvine's air is unremarkable, and that is rather the point: no port, no refinery, and enough ocean influence to keep the worst of the basin's smog inland of it. The exception sits on the city's eastern edge, where the planned neighborhoods stop and the Santa Ana Mountains foothills begin. In October 2020 the Silverado Fire started near Santiago Canyon Road, burned 13,390 acres and put roughly 90,000 residents and schools under mandatory evacuation orders, driven by Santa Ana winds that Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy called "extraordinary even by Santa Ana standards." Five weeks later the Bond Fire burned through the same canyons, and South Coast AQMD's smoke advisory recorded very unhealthy AQI in Irvine.
What Canairy does for Irvine
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Irvine: 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 Irvine or across the country, on one screen.
The fires start in the canyons, not in the city
Irvine itself has very little to burn. The fires that matter here start in the brush of the foothills northeast of town and push down through the canyons. The Silverado Fire ran from October 26 to November 7, 2020 and covered 13,390 acres; Southern California Edison later said a lashing wire from a T-Mobile telecommunications line may have contacted one of its electric lines. Evacuation orders reached Irvine communities including Orchard Hills, Northwood and Portola Springs.
The Bond Fire followed on December 2, 2020, starting from a house fire on Bond Way in the community of Silverado and burning 6,686 acres before containment on December 10. It burned right up against the Silverado Fire's fresh scar, forced about 25,000 people out and destroyed 31 structures. South Coast AQMD's smoke advisory that week put Newport Beach, Irvine and Lake Forest in the very unhealthy AQI category and declared a no-burn day banning wood burning across the whole South Coast Air Basin.
Does a countywide air quality number mean anything here?
Not much. South Coast AQMD splits Orange County into six separate forecast areas — North Orange County, Central Orange County, North Coastal Orange County, Saddleback Valley, Central Coastal and Capistrano Valley — because one number for a county this varied would be close to useless. Irvine stretches from near the Newport Beach line all the way up to the foothills, and the two ends of the city do not always read the same.
The district's own monitoring makes the point. During the Silverado and Blue Ridge fires in late October 2020, AQMD reported that monitors and low-cost sensors across its entire jurisdiction were reading Good to Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — except for its temporary monitor in Irvine, which was reading Unhealthy.
Living near the El Toro Y is its own question
Interstate 5 and Interstate 405 merge in southeastern Irvine at the interchange everyone calls the El Toro Y. Daily traffic there grew from about 102,000 vehicles in 1975 to roughly 356,000 by 2002, and when the expansion finished in 1997 the interchange stood 26 lanes wide, briefly one of the widest roads in the world.
Tailpipe pollution drops off sharply with distance from a freeway, so this is a street-by-street question rather than a citywide one. If your home or your child's school sits within a few hundred yards of the 5, the 405 or the 133, the sensor nearest you will tell you more than any Irvine average.
Irvine air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Irvine right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 5:09 AM PDT, the air quality in Irvine, California is AQI 27 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.9 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Irvine today?
Most of the time it has come down from the canyons on the city's eastern edge. The Silverado Fire in October 2020 and the Bond Fire that December both started in the canyon country northeast of town, and both put smoke over the city — during the Bond Fire, South Coast AQMD's advisory recorded very unhealthy AQI in Irvine, Newport Beach and Lake Forest. Smoke also drifts in from fires elsewhere in the basin. If nothing is burning anywhere, haze on a still summer afternoon is more likely ozone than smoke.
How close did the Silverado Fire get to Irvine?
Close enough that about 90,000 residents and schools were told to leave. The fire began near Santiago Canyon Road on October 26, 2020, in the foothills northeast of the city, and evacuation orders reached Irvine communities including Orchard Hills, Northwood and Portola Springs before it was contained on November 7 at 13,390 acres.
Is Irvine's air better than the rest of Orange County?
On an ordinary day, generally yes. Irvine has no port, no refinery and no heavy industry, and it sits far enough west to miss the worst of the region's inland ozone — South Coast AQMD keeps its regulatory monitors inland precisely because, as a district spokesman put it in 2021, the highest concentrations of ozone and PM2.5 tend to be inland. What Irvine has instead is a fire season on its eastern boundary, and those events move the reading further and faster than anything routine.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Irvine, 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 Irvine
We watch Irvine's air. You live your life.
Set your threshold once and get a heads-up only when the air actually changes for you. Free on the App Store & Google Play.