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.
AQI 3 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Laramie, Wyoming is AQI 3 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 0.6 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 17. 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 Laramie: 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 Laramie and Centennial, Rock River, Bosler, Tie Siding. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Laramie
The sensors Canairy reads in Laramie agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 16-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.9 mi SE | 7 | Good |
| 1.3 mi E | 2 | Good |
| 1.4 mi E | 1 | Good |
| 1.6 mi W | 4 | Good |
| 2.3 mi ESE | 17 | Good |
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.
What Canairy does for Laramie
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Laramie: 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 Laramie or across the country, on one screen.
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?
As of September 14, 2026 at 6:10 AM MDT, the air quality in Laramie, Wyoming is AQI 3 — Good — with PM2.5 at 0.6 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
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 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 Laramie, 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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