Air Quality in Klamath Falls, Oregon — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Klamath Falls — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 46 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Klamath Falls, Oregon is AQI 46 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 8.2 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 32 to 52. 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 Klamath Falls: 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 Klamath Falls and Altamont, Keno, Chiloquin, Merrill. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Klamath Falls
The sensors Canairy reads in Klamath Falls are 20 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 1.8 mi W | 52 | Moderate |
| 5.9 mi WNW | 32 | Good |
| 7.1 mi ESE | 46 | Good |
Klamath Falls has one of the most stubborn winter air problems in Oregon, and it is almost entirely homegrown. The city sits at about 4,095 feet on the southeastern shore of Upper Klamath Lake, in a basin in the rain shadow of the Cascades that gets barely thirteen and a half inches of rain a year. On cold, clear nights the air stratifies, cold air settling on the basin floor with warmer air sitting over the top of it, and the smoke from the city's wood stoves has nowhere to go. EPA designated the area a federal nonattainment area for fine particles in 2009, and the city has been working its way back out ever since.
What Canairy does for Klamath Falls
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Klamath Falls: 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 Klamath Falls or across the country, on one screen.
The basin is a bowl, and in winter it has a lid
Klamath County Public Health explains the mechanism in one sentence: when temperatures are low and the skies are clear, the cold air moves below the warm air and traps the smoke in the basin. That is a temperature inversion, and during one the mixing height — the depth of atmosphere available to dilute anything released into it — collapses to a fraction of normal. Smoke that would blow away on an ordinary day just accumulates a few hundred feet above the streets.
The rest of the geography works against the city too. High desert at 4,000-plus feet means genuinely cold winters and a long heating season. The Cascade rain shadow means fewer of the wet Pacific fronts that scour the Willamette Valley clean every few days. So a Klamath Falls inversion can hold for days, and the readings climb the whole time.
Nonattainment, and the long road back
EPA designated the Klamath Falls area nonattainment for the 24-hour PM2.5 standard on November 13, 2009, and classified it moderate on June 2, 2014. DEQ submitted an attainment plan in December 2012 built almost entirely around controlling residential wood combustion, and EPA approved it on June 6, 2016. The measurements come from the Peterson School regulatory monitor. Its 24-hour design value was 34 micrograms per cubic meter for 2012 through 2014, 32 for 2015 through 2017 with wildfire days excluded, and 34 again for 2022 through 2024 — against a federal standard of 35.
Oregon submitted a request on August 20, 2024 asking EPA to redesignate the area to attainment and to approve a maintenance plan demonstrating continued attainment through 2037, and EPA proposed to approve it in March 2026. It is worth reading those numbers honestly. A design value of 34 against a limit of 35 is passing the test, not solving the problem. Residential wood heating remains the major source of the emissions behind the winter violations.
The burn calendar and the stove swap
From October 15 through March 15, Klamath County runs a mandatory curtailment program tied to the forecast for the next day inside the Klamath Falls air quality zone. Below 22 micrograms per cubic meter, burning is allowed. Between 22 and 35, only exempt devices — certified stoves, pellet stoves and fireplace inserts — may be used. Above 35, no burning is allowed and exemptions are void. If you heat with wood here, checking the day's advisory before you light the stove is part of the routine.
The other half of the strategy is replacing the stoves outright. EPA awarded Oregon DEQ a targeted airshed grant of $1,839,947 in December 2020, then a second one of $4,669,372 in November 2023 to fund roughly 300 more stove replacements with heat pumps and gas furnaces plus about 100 home weatherization projects over five years, with priority for low-income households and renters. EPA credits nearly 500 replacements in the decade before that, and the work is run locally by DEQ with Klamath County Public Health, the South Central Oregon Economic Development District and Klamath Lake Community Action Services.
Klamath Falls air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Klamath Falls right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Klamath Falls, Oregon is AQI 46 — Good — with PM2.5 at 8.2 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Klamath Falls today?
It depends on the season. From roughly October through March, smoke in Klamath Falls is usually residential wood heating held down by an inversion — cold air settling in the basin with warm air over the top, so nothing disperses. That is the pattern behind the area's federal nonattainment designation, and it is why the county runs a mandatory burn curtailment program from October 15 to March 15. In late summer the more likely source is wildfire smoke drifting in from fires elsewhere in southern Oregon or northern California.
Can I burn wood in Klamath Falls tonight?
Check the county's advisory first — it is issued daily from October 15 through March 15 for the Klamath Falls air quality zone, based on the forecast fine-particle level. If the forecast is under 22 micrograms per cubic meter, burning is allowed. Between 22 and 35, only exempt devices such as certified stoves, pellet stoves and fireplace inserts may be used. Above 35, no burning is allowed inside the zone and exemptions do not apply.
Is Klamath Falls still a federal nonattainment area?
It has been designated nonattainment for the 24-hour PM2.5 standard since November 2009. Oregon asked EPA on August 20, 2024 to redesignate the area to attainment and to approve a maintenance plan that would hold through 2037, and EPA proposed to approve that request in March 2026. The measured numbers are close to the line: the Peterson School monitor's design value for 2022 through 2024 was 34 micrograms per cubic meter against a standard of 35.
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 Klamath Falls, 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 Klamath Falls
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