Air Quality in Lafayette, Louisiana — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Lafayette — with free alerts the moment cane-burning smoke drifts into town.
AQI 13 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Lafayette, Louisiana is AQI 13 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.4 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 12 to 15. 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 Lafayette: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a moderate 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 Lafayette and Broussard, Youngsville, Scott, Carencro. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Lafayette
The sensors Canairy reads in Lafayette agree right now — all 2 sit in the Good band, a 3-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.0 mi WSW | 15 | Good |
| 10.9 mi SSE | 12 | Good |
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.'
What Canairy does for Lafayette
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Lafayette: 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 Lafayette or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Lafayette is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 44 | Good | ozone |
Sunday, calm to light southwesterly winds will reduce dispersion, allowing pollutants to accumulate over the Bayou State. However, hot and humid conditions along with widely scattered showers and thunderstorms will aid low-level mixing. In addition, pollutant carryover will be low. As a result, AQI levels will be Good to high-Good. Monday, partly cloudy skies and scattered showers and thunderstorms will hinder ozone development. However, light and variable winds will limit dispersion. Therefore, AQI levels will range from Good to low-Moderate. Tuesday, increasing sun and highs in the mid- to upper-90s will aid ozone formation. In addition, calm to light southeasterly winds will hinder dispersion, resulting in high-Good to low-Moderate AQI levels in most locations.
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Lafayette reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
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?
As of September 14, 2026 at 9:49 AM CDT, the air quality in Lafayette, Louisiana is AQI 13 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.4 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
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 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 Lafayette, 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 Lafayette
We watch Lafayette'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.