Air Quality in Lincoln, Nebraska — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Lincoln — with free alerts when Flint Hills smoke or summer ozone rolls in.
AQI 29 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Lincoln, Nebraska is AQI 29 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 5.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 14 to 48. 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 Lincoln: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very high 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 Lincoln and Waverly, Hickman, Malcolm, Raymond. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Lincoln
The sensors Canairy reads in Lincoln agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 34-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| City center | 29 | Good |
| 1.3 mi N | 33 | Good |
| 1.9 mi ENE | 48 | Good |
| 2.6 mi SSE | 17 | Good |
| 7.0 mi SSE | 14 | Good |
Lincoln's air is genuinely good most of the year. Lancaster County earned a B grade in the American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report, with a median AQI of 41 and zero unhealthy or hazardous days recorded across ten years of monitoring — helped along by Nebraska's near-constant Plains wind, which tends to flush out pollution before it can sit still and build up. The exception lands every spring, when smoke from prescribed rangeland burning hundreds of miles south, in the Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma, drifts north on the wind and can turn a clear Lincoln morning hazy by afternoon.
What Canairy does for Lincoln
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Lincoln: 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 Lincoln or across the country, on one screen.
Why Lincoln's air is clean most days
Lincoln doesn't have the refineries, ports, or dense freeway stacks that give some cities a year-round pollution baseline. The city's own power plant, Lincoln Electric System's Terry Bundy Generating Station, runs on natural gas rather than coal. Combined with Nebraska's spot in the Great Plains wind corridor — among the windiest parts of the country outside the Rockies — pollution that does form usually gets flushed out before it can build into the kind of stagnant haze that settles over cities boxed in by mountains or river basins.
That shows up in the numbers. Lancaster County, Lincoln's home county, posted a B grade in the American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report, with 83.8 percent good air-quality days and no unhealthy or hazardous days at all across the ten-year period measured. The one pollutant the report flags as the county's dominant concern is ground-level ozone, not soot or smoke — a summer-heat problem that runs moderate far more often than it turns unhealthy here.
Every spring, smoke arrives from three states away
The Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department tells residents to watch air quality closely for an eight- to ten-week stretch each spring, because smoke from controlled burning across the southern and central United States can drift into southeast Nebraska even when there's no fire anywhere near the city. The source is the Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma, where ranchers set fire to tens of thousands of acres of tallgrass prairie every March and April to clear dead growth and hold back invasive trees before cattle go out to graze.
It isn't hypothetical. Nebraska's Department of Health and Human Services issued a smoke advisory covering southeastern Nebraska, including both Lincoln and Omaha, for March 21–22, 2026, warning that Flint Hills burn smoke could push air quality to Moderate and periodically Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. The fires can be three states away and still put a haze over the Capitol dome — exactly the kind of event a citywide forecast can miss and a live sensor reading catches.
Lincoln runs its own air program, and watches harvest dust too
Unlike most of Nebraska, Lincoln doesn't rely solely on the state to watch its air. The Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department is one of only three local agencies in Nebraska — alongside Omaha Air Quality Control and the Douglas County Health Department — delegated to run its own program, continuously monitoring carbon monoxide, tracking ozone seasonally, and periodically testing for PM2.5. Open burning inside city limits requires a permit under Lincoln Municipal Code 8.06 and county resolution R-13-0073, because backyard and brush burning is still a real local source of smoke here.
The other seasonal wildcard is dust. Lincoln sits inside some of the most productive corn and soybean ground in the country, and in a dry harvest — like fall 2024, when combines were kicking up thick clouds of dust across Nebraska as more than 80 percent of the soybean crop came in during one of the driest harvests farmers could remember — that dust can blend with any drifting wildfire smoke to dull the air on the city's farm-country edges well into October.
Lincoln air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Lincoln right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:40 AM CDT, the air quality in Lincoln, Nebraska is AQI 29 — Good — with PM2.5 at 5.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Lincoln get smoky or hazy in early spring?
Most years, the Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department flags an eight- to ten-week window each spring, roughly March into April, when smoke from prescribed rangeland burns in the Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma can drift north into southeast Nebraska. Nebraska's own health department issued a smoke advisory for Lincoln and Omaha on March 21–22, 2026 for exactly this reason. The fires are hundreds of miles away, but the smoke is real and can push a normally clear day into Moderate or Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.
Does Lincoln have industrial air pollution?
Not much. Lincoln's own power plant runs on natural gas rather than coal, and the city has little of the heavy industry that drives year-round pollution elsewhere. Lancaster County earned a B grade in the American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report, with ground-level ozone — a summer-heat problem, not a soot problem — flagged as the area's main pollutant.
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 Lincoln, 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 Lincoln
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