Air Quality in Lafayette, Louisiana — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Lafayette — with free alerts the moment cane-burning smoke drifts into town.

Live Lafayette AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Lafayette and Broussard, Youngsville, Scott, Carencro.

Most of the year, the air in Lafayette is genuinely good — Gulf breezes across the flat Acadiana prairie tend to clear pollution out rather than let it collect, and Lafayette Parish's ozone has stayed in the EPA's maintenance status, not nonattainment, since 1995. The exception is harvest season. Roughly from late September through January, growers across the parishes ringing Lafayette burn sugarcane fields to strip away the leaves before milling, and when the wind is wrong, smoke and ash drift into the city itself — what longtime residents call 'black snow.'

Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.

Cane-burning season is Lafayette's real air story

Louisiana's sugar mills start grinding cane as early as September and keep going into January, and growers burn standing or windrowed cane beforehand to strip away leaves and trash so the stalks harvest cleaner. The Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry and the LSU AgCenter run a voluntary Certified Prescribed Burn Manager program that rates each day on a 1-to-5 'category day' scale — category 1 means no burning at all, usually called when the National Weather Service issues an Air Stagnation Advisory at the state's request. Even on an approved burn day, the state's own guidelines acknowledge that ash from standing cane can fall out within 3 to 5 miles of the fire and keep drifting for another 15 to 20 miles beyond that.

Most of the cane fields feeding Louisiana's mills sit in the parishes that ring Lafayette — St. Martin, Iberia, St. Landry, and Vermilion — rather than inside Lafayette Parish itself, which at 269 square miles is one of the smallest and most urbanized parishes in the state. That means whether a given burn reaches Lafayette depends entirely on which way the wind is blowing that afternoon. KATC has reported on the soot that 'rains down across Acadiana' each harvest season, and a pediatric asthma and allergy specialist told the station that in 33 years of practice she has seen an uptick in asthma flare-ups every burning season, with some children getting seriously sick.

Lafayette isn't part of Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley'

Louisiana's dense corridor of oil refineries and petrochemical plants — the roughly 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans often called 'Cancer Alley' — sits well east of Lafayette. Lafayette's own relationship with the oil and gas industry is mostly on the services side: by 2018 the city had more oil and gas industry workers than anywhere else in the state, but that means engineering offices, equipment yards, and drilling-support companies rather than refineries or chemical crackers inside the city limits. That distinction matters for day-to-day air quality — Lafayette doesn't carry the industrial-emissions load that shows up in the parishes east of Baton Rouge.

The parish's own state monitor, listed by Louisiana DEQ as the Lafayette USGS site, tracks ozone and PM2.5 around the clock, and on an ordinary day both read in the Good range. Lafayette Parish's ozone was redesignated from nonattainment to maintenance status back in October 1995 and hasn't returned to the EPA's nonattainment list since, which is the main reason smog isn't the seasonal story here the way it is in some larger Gulf Coast metro areas.

Why one number for the whole parish doesn't tell you enough

Lafayette Parish is flat coastal prairie, just inland from the Gulf and only 36 to 49 feet above sea level, so there's little terrain to trap or funnel smoke the way a mountain valley would. Instead it's wind direction, not topography, that decides who breathes cane smoke on a given day — a burn southeast of the city can leave Broussard and Youngsville hazy while Carencro to the north stays clear, and the next day's shifting wind can reverse that completely.

That's why Canairy reads a network of sensors spread across Lafayette and the surrounding towns instead of relying on a single parish-wide monitor. During harvest season especially, the reading that matters is the one nearest the place you actually are, not an average that can hide a smoky pocket a few miles away.

Lafayette air quality FAQ

What is the air quality in Lafayette right now?

This page shows the current AQI for Lafayette, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood.

Why does the air get smoky in Lafayette in the fall?

From roughly late September through January, Acadiana's sugarcane growers burn fields before harvest to strip away dead leaves, and smoke and ash can drift into Lafayette itself when the wind blows in from the surrounding parishes. Louisiana's Certified Prescribed Burn Manager program limits burning on stagnant-air days, but ash from a single burn can still travel 15 to 20 miles, which is why longtime residents call the seasonal residue 'black snow.'

Is Lafayette part of Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley'?

No. Cancer Alley refers to the roughly 85-mile corridor of refineries and petrochemical plants between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, well east of Lafayette. Lafayette's oil and gas industry is concentrated in services and equipment rather than refining, so the parish's day-to-day industrial emissions are a smaller factor than sugarcane-burning season.

What AQI level is unhealthy?

Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0-50 is Good and 51-100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups - kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions - and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.

Where does Canairy's Lafayette data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Lafayette and surrounding towns, cross-referenced with government monitors and the Google Air Quality API. You can see every sensor behind your numbers on the live map - there's no black box.

Is Canairy free?

Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.