Air Quality in Juneau, Alaska — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Juneau — with free alerts when winter wood smoke settles into the valley.
AQI 69 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Juneau, Alaska is AQI 69 — Moderate and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 18.9 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 69 to 70. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.3 times 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 is quiet in Juneau right now. Google's pollen forecast covers this area and shows no tree, grass or weed activity today — which is a real answer, not missing data.
Free to download · Live data from PurpleAir & public monitors
Live PurpleAir sensor map for Juneau and Douglas, Mendenhall Valley, Auke Bay, Lemon Creek. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Juneau
The sensors Canairy reads in Juneau agree right now — all 2 sit in the Moderate band, a 1-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 8.0 mi NW | 69 | Moderate |
| 8.0 mi NW | 70 | Moderate |
Juneau's air is clean for most of the year — this is a temperate rainforest capital wedged between the Gastineau Channel and the Juneau Icefield, and the marine wind off the water usually keeps things moving. The real story is winter: on cold, still nights the Mendenhall Valley acts like a bowl, trapping wood smoke from home heating close to the ground until the city itself has to step in. It happened again as recently as December 2025, when an extreme cold snap led the City and Borough of Juneau to declare an air emergency and briefly ban fireplace and wood-stove burning valley-wide.
What Canairy does for Juneau
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Juneau: 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 Juneau or across the country, on one screen.
Why Juneau can legally ban your fireplace
Juneau is unusual among Alaska communities in having a standing legal tool for its worst wood-smoke days. Under CBJ Ordinance 2008-28, the city runs a Woodsmoke Control Program each year from October 1 through April 30, watching hourly fine-particulate readings from the Alaska DEC's Floyd Dryden monitoring station in the Mendenhall Valley. When enough consecutive readings show unhealthy particulate levels, the city can declare an air emergency, and under that ordinance every wood stove and fireplace in the valley has to go cold until the emergency is lifted — pellet stoves and certified masonry heaters are the only exceptions.
The most recent example came on December 20, 2025, when the city called an air emergency in the Mendenhall Valley in the middle of a brutal cold snap, then lifted it a day later once wind picked up and cleared the particulates out. CBJ's own announcement acknowledged the timing looked backwards — banning wood heat during a cold snap — but the coldest, stillest nights are exactly when smoke has nowhere to go. The city tracks and warns residents through a Woodsmoke Hotline, text alerts, and burn-ban signs posted around the valley.
The valley bowl versus the open channel
The air-quality problem is really a Mendenhall Valley problem, not a downtown one. The valley — stretching from the airport north toward Mendenhall Glacier and west to Auke Lake — is ringed by mountains that block the wind on calm winter nights, so a warm-air lid settles over the cold air below and holds wood smoke at ground level for hours or days. Downtown Juneau and Douglas, across the Gastineau Channel, sit more directly exposed to airflow off the water and don't trap smoke the same way, which is why a single citywide number can miss what a Mendenhall Valley household is actually breathing.
That divide is also why Juneau leans so heavily on ground-truth monitoring rather than assumption: the Floyd Dryden station, run jointly by Alaska DEC and NOAA's Juneau Forecast Office, exists specifically because the valley's air can be dramatically worse than the rest of the borough on the same night. Reading sensors placed near where people actually live, rather than one number for a geographically split-up city, is the only way to know which side of that divide you're on.
Wildfire smoke is rare here, but not unheard of
Southeast Alaska's coastal, rainy climate mostly spares Juneau the wildfire-smoke seasons that define much of the West. But that changed briefly in July 2023, when intensifying wildfires in British Columbia pushed the Alaska Division of Air Quality to issue the region's first-ever wildfire smoke advisory, warning that conditions could range from good to unhealthy depending on wind direction. National Weather Service meteorologist Andrew Park described what actually showed up in Juneau as 'a thin haze — it's way up in the atmosphere and it's not really noticeable,' with the advisory noting that any smoke would tend to settle in the mountains and drain into coastal communities like Juneau overnight and in the early morning.
It was a mild event as these things go, but it was also new: Southeast Alaska had not needed that kind of advisory before 2023. With Canadian fire seasons increasingly reaching further each summer, it's a scenario worth having a sensor reading for rather than judging by eye, especially since any smoke that does arrive tends to show up overnight rather than during the obviously smoky afternoons that West Coast residents are used to watching for.
Juneau air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Juneau right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 6:29 AM PDT, the air quality in Juneau, Alaska is AQI 69 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 18.9 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Juneau sometimes ban wood stoves in the winter?
Under CBJ Ordinance 2008-28, the City and Borough of Juneau can declare an air emergency when hourly fine-particulate readings from the Mendenhall Valley's Floyd Dryden monitoring station show sustained unhealthy levels, usually on cold, calm nights when a temperature inversion traps wood smoke close to the ground. During an emergency, fireplaces and wood stoves in the valley must stay unlit until conditions improve — the city called one as recently as December 2025.
Does wildfire smoke ever reach Juneau?
Rarely, and usually only as thin, high-altitude haze rather than the thick smoke seen further south. In July 2023, intensifying wildfires in British Columbia prompted Southeast Alaska's first-ever wildfire smoke advisory, with any smoke tending to settle in the mountains and drain into coastal communities like Juneau overnight.
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 2 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Juneau, 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 Juneau
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