Air Quality in Laramie, Wyoming — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Laramie — with free alerts when the wind kicks up dust or wildfire smoke moves in.

Live Laramie AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Laramie and Centennial, Rock River, Bosler, Tie Siding.

Most days, the air in Laramie is clean. This is a high, dry stretch of southeastern Wyoming with a small population and little heavy industry, and Albany County's air quality is generally good by national standards. The exception here isn't smoke first — it's wind. Laramie sits in a valley squeezed between the Snowy Range and the Laramie Range, a gap that funnels some of the strongest sustained winds in the country through town, and on the driest days that wind can pick up enough dust to trigger a warning of its own. Wildfire smoke shows up too, whether from a fire burning in the nearby Medicine Bow National Forest or drifting in from hundreds of miles away, and the same wind that usually clears Laramie's air out can just as easily pin that smoke over the valley for days.

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.

Laramie sits in one of the windiest wind funnels in the US

Wyoming as a whole ranks first in the nation for average wind speed, at 12.9 mph, and Rawlins, Laramie, Cheyenne, and Casper are consistently named the state's windiest cities. Laramie's version of that comes from its geography: the city sits at 7,165 feet on a high, open valley floor, with the Snowy Range's peaks (over 12,000 feet) roughly 30 miles to the west and the lower Laramie Range about 7 miles to the east. That gap between the two ranges acts like a funnel for the prevailing westerlies — which is also why Interstate 80 just west of town, near Arlington and Sherman Hill, is notorious for gusts strong enough to tip over high-profile vehicles.

That funnel produces genuine extremes. On March 12, 2026, a wind event pushed a gust to 81 mph at Laramie Regional Airport — one of the five strongest gusts ever recorded there, tying January 13, 2021 as the fourth-windiest day on record (the all-time mark is a 90 mph gust from June 27, 2017). A personal weather station between Laramie and Centennial clocked 109 mph the same day. Wyoming had just come off its warmest winter on record, which left the valley dry enough that the wind lifted dust rather than snow, and a dust storm warning covered stretches of I-80, US-287, and US-30 around Laramie as visibility outside town dropped below a quarter mile.

Wildfire smoke has reached Laramie from next door and from half a continent away

The closest call was the Mullen Fire, which started in the Savage Run Wilderness of Carbon County on September 17, 2020, grew to 176,878 acres in the Medicine Bow National Forest, and burned as close as 28 miles west of Laramie before it was contained in late October. On October 1, 2020, the Wyoming Department of Health issued an air quality advisory covering southeastern Carbon County, southern Albany County, and most of Laramie County because of the smoke, telling older adults, young children, and anyone with a respiratory condition to cut back on outdoor exertion. Photos from that week show Cheyenne and Laramie under a haze of ash-flecked smoke, and several southeast Wyoming events were cancelled or moved indoors because of the air.

Smoke doesn't need a nearby fire to reach the Laramie Valley, either. In the summer of 2021, the National Weather Service in Cheyenne issued a PM2.5 air quality alert for south-central Wyoming, including Laramie, starting July 12 from a mix of wildfires and other sources, then a separate alert on August 1 as smoke from wildfires burning in Canada and the Pacific Northwest settled over central and eastern Wyoming. On days like those, the valley's usual wind isn't enough to clear a continent-scale smoke plume, and the air can turn hazy even when the sky over Wyoming itself is fire-free.

Why the wind is usually good news, not bad

It's worth saying plainly: most of Laramie's wind is why the air stays clean, not why it gets dirty. Sustained westerlies of 30 to 40 mph with gusts into the 50s and 60s are routine here in winter, and that constant churn scours out the kind of stagnant, trapped air that causes ozone and particulate buildup in valley cities with calmer weather. Laramie doesn't have Sacramento's inversions or Napa's still winter nights — it has close to the opposite problem, on the rare occasions it has one at all.

The flip side is that Laramie's bad-air days tend to arrive fast and from a specific cause, rather than build up gradually. The American Lung Association's guidance after the March 2026 dust event was the same it gives anywhere dust or smoke spikes: people with asthma, older adults, and children are the first to feel it, through coughing, wheezing, or a flare-up of an existing lung condition, and the safest move is to get inside and check a real reading rather than guess from how the sky looks. That's the case for checking Laramie's sensors specifically, instead of assuming a normally clean city is fine on any given afternoon.

Laramie air quality FAQ

What is the air quality in Laramie right now?

This page shows the current AQI for Laramie, 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 Laramie get dust storms?

Laramie sits in a high valley funneled between the Snowy Range to the west and the Laramie Range to the east, a gap that channels some of the strongest sustained winds in the country — Wyoming ranks first in the nation for average wind speed. When the ground is dry, as it was heading into March 2026 after Wyoming's warmest winter on record, that wind lifts dust instead of clearing the air, and gusts have topped 80 mph at Laramie Regional Airport.

Has wildfire smoke ever affected Laramie's air quality?

Yes. The Mullen Fire burned within 28 miles of Laramie in the fall of 2020, and the Wyoming Department of Health issued an air quality advisory covering the area that October. Laramie's air has also degraded from wildfire smoke that drifted in from Canada and the Pacific Northwest, as it did in the summer of 2021, even when no fire was burning anywhere near Wyoming.

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 Laramie data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Laramie and surrounding Albany County communities, 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.