Air Quality in Kennewick, Washington — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Kennewick — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 50 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Kennewick, Washington is AQI 50 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 9.0 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 34 to 59. 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 Kennewick: 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 Kennewick and Richland, Pasco, West Richland, Finley. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Kennewick
The sensors Canairy reads in Kennewick are 25 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 4.7 mi NNW | 50 | Good |
| 6.4 mi WNW | 34 | Good |
| 7.0 mi WSW | 36 | Good |
| 8.2 mi NW | 53 | Moderate |
| 10.3 mi NW | 59 | Moderate |
This is not the wet, green Washington. Kennewick sits on the southwest bank of the Columbia in a semi-arid basin that gets under eight inches of rain a year — the Benton Clean Air Agency notes the annual rainfall here is drier than most parts of Arizona — with Badger Mountain and Candy Mountain to the west and the Horse Heaven Hills rising behind town to the south. The Washington Department of Ecology says those hills create a bowl effect that traps air in the Tri-Cities region. Two things mainly fill that bowl: dust lifted off dry farmland by high wind, and wildfire smoke in late summer. Ecology named Tri-Cities to Wallula one of sixteen communities in the state overburdened and highly impacted by air pollution, listing elevated ozone, coarse particulate matter (PM10) and cumulative criteria air pollution.
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Dust off the Horse Heaven Hills
Ecology identifies the farmlands southwest of Kennewick — the Horse Heaven Hills, dryland wheat country — and northeast of the city as the main sources of dust in high wind events. When it goes, it goes hard. On 14 August 2015 wind speeds hit a maximum of 56 miles per hour and Ecology's Kennewick monitor recorded a 24-hour average PM10 reading of 589 micrograms per cubic meter, against a federal 24-hour standard of 150. The state responded with a High Wind Fugitive Dust Mitigation Plan for the Wallula Maintenance Area, and put $163,000 into the Benton Conservation District to help farmers adopt practices that disturb the soil less. The regulatory obligation goes back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the area recorded a large number of 24-hour PM10 exceedances and Wallula was designated nonattainment.
Ecology's plain description of the cause is a combination of high winds, dry weather and uncovered fields. A few dust storms a year hit Central and Eastern Washington, Kennewick among them, and while they can happen in any season they mostly occur in summer and fall; the Benton Clean Air Agency notes the Columbia Plateau is subject to frequent high winds particularly during spring, summer and fall. Dust is PM10, which is coarser than smoke — about one-seventh the diameter of a human hair, small enough to lodge deep in the lungs.
Smoke season, and what it does to the numbers
Everyday air here is better than the reputation. At the Kennewick-Metaline monitor the 24-hour PM2.5 98th percentile ran 17.1, 16.1 and 15.5 micrograms per cubic meter across 2022, 2023 and 2024 — a design value of 16 against a federal limit of 35. The annual mean design value was 5.5 against a limit of 9.0. Across 2022 to 2024 the Tri-Cities to Wallula community averaged 2.3 days a year with air quality unhealthy for sensitive groups or worse, well down from an average of 8.3 days a year over 2020 to 2022. Ecology's note on those days is short: most were primarily caused by wildfire smoke.
The smoke contribution is measurable. Excluding wildfire-affected days cut annual PM2.5 concentrations in this community by 5 to 25 percent depending on the year. And the two problems can arrive together — in 2023 there were three days over the 24-hour PM10 standard at both the Kennewick-Metaline and Burbank-Maple Street monitors, which Ecology attributes to wildfire smoke and windblown dust.
Ozone builds on the hot afternoons
The third pollutant here is one you cannot see or smell. Ecology's ozone monitor on South Steptoe Street sits just outside the community boundary, but because ozone is a regional pollutant the readings are treated as representative of the Tri-Cities. Its fourth-highest daily maximum eight-hour concentration was 0.067 parts per million in 2022, 0.067 in 2023 and 0.064 in 2024, giving a 2024 design value of 0.066 against a federal standard of 0.070. Under the limit — but not by a wide margin, and ozone is the reason Ecology listed elevated ozone first among the pollutants that got this community identified.
Ozone is made rather than emitted: exhaust and vapors react in sunlight and heat, so the worst readings come on still, hot summer afternoons, and July here averages a daily high of 91.3 degrees with a record of 115. The freeways inside the community boundary are I-82, I-182, US-12, US-395 and SR-240. The health picture is worth knowing too — the Tri-Cities to Wallula community has higher rates than Washington as a whole of asthma (12.3 percent of adults against 11.4), COPD (6.9 against 5.7), diabetes (11.7 against 9.6) and stroke (3.6 against 3.1).
Kennewick air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Kennewick right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Kennewick, Washington is AQI 50 — Good — with PM2.5 at 9.0 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Kennewick today?
In summer and early fall it is almost always wildfire smoke, and it usually comes from fires well outside Benton County — the eastern Cascades, central Washington, Oregon, Idaho or British Columbia. Ecology's own review of the Tri-Cities to Wallula community found that most of the days when air quality reached unhealthy levels between 2022 and 2024 were primarily caused by wildfire smoke, and that stripping out wildfire-affected days lowered the year's average PM2.5 by anywhere from 5 to 25 percent. If it is windy and the haze is brown rather than grey, though, check the wind direction: dust off the Horse Heaven Hills looks similar from a distance and behaves very differently.
Is that brown haze dust or smoke?
Wind is the tell. Dust storms here come with strong wind — the 2015 event that pushed the Kennewick PM10 monitor to 589 micrograms per cubic meter came with gusts up to 56 miles per hour — and they usually clear within hours once the wind drops. Wildfire smoke tends to settle in on calm or lightly moving air and stay for days. There is also a measurement catch worth knowing: dust is mostly coarse PM10, and low-cost optical sensors like PurpleAir are built around fine PM2.5, so a big dust event can register lower on a consumer sensor than it deserves. On a genuinely dusty day, trust your eyes and stay inside regardless of the number.
How bad do the dust storms actually get?
Bad enough that the state wrote a plan about them. On 14 August 2015 Ecology's Kennewick monitor logged a 24-hour average PM10 of 589 micrograms per cubic meter, nearly four times the federal 24-hour standard of 150, during winds that peaked at 56 miles per hour. Ecology names the farmland southwest of the city in the Horse Heaven Hills, and northeast of it, as the main sources, and has funded the Benton Conservation District to get growers onto practices that leave less bare soil exposed. Most years are far quieter than 2015 — in 2024 both local PM10 monitors met the standard — but a few dust storms a year is normal for this part of the state.
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 Kennewick, 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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