Air Quality in Los Angeles, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Los Angeles — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 6 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Los Angeles, California is AQI 6 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 1.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 0 to 11. 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 Los Angeles: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a low 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 Los Angeles and Pasadena, Glendale, Santa Monica, Burbank. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Los Angeles
The sensors Canairy reads in Los Angeles agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 11-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 4.8 mi NNE | 6 | Good |
| 5.1 mi E | 11 | Good |
| 6.6 mi E | 0 | Good |
| 7.2 mi NE | 6 | Good |
Los Angeles is the city that gave the country the word smog, and it still records the worst ozone pollution in the nation almost every year. The air is far cleaner than it was in the tailpipe-choked mid-century decades, but summer sun still cooks traffic and port exhaust into unhealthy ozone, and a single wind-driven fire can turn the sky orange overnight, as the Palisades and Eaton fires did in January 2025.
What Canairy does for Los Angeles
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Los Angeles: 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 Los Angeles or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Los Angeles is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 55 | Moderate | PM2.5 |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Central LA CO 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.
The city that named smog still has the nation's worst ozone
Los Angeles sits in a shallow coastal bowl, the South Coast Air Basin, open to the Pacific on the west and walled in by mountains to the north and east. Cool ocean air slides in under a lid of warmer air above, an inversion that hovers over the basin on average 260 days a year and traps whatever the city puts into the sky. Add relentless summer sunshine and the exhaust from millions of cars, and you get photochemical smog. In July 1943 an early episode was so thick that residents feared a wartime Japanese gas attack, and the Los Angeles Times ran the headline 'City Hunting for Source of Gas Attack.' A Caltech scientist, Arie Haagen-Smit, later traced it to tailpipe and refinery fumes reacting with sunlight.
Decades of regulation have transformed that air. Angelenos now breathe roughly 77 fewer days of unhealthy ozone each year than they did in 2000, about two and a half months' worth. But Los Angeles still ranks as the most ozone-polluted metro area in the country, a spot it has held in 25 of the 26 years the American Lung Association has published its State of the Air report. Ozone is an invisible summer problem, worst on hot, sunny, stagnant afternoons, which is exactly when the smog era's ghost still shows up.
January 2025: the Palisades and Eaton fires
On January 7, 2025, two fires broke out on the same day and, driven by powerful Santa Ana winds, tore straight into inhabited neighborhoods. The Palisades Fire burned through Pacific Palisades on the coast, sending gray smoke plumes streaming out over the ocean and into the hills north of downtown. The Eaton Fire started in Eaton Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains and pushed down into Altadena, burning more than 14,000 acres and destroying over 9,400 structures, with West Altadena, long a hub of Black homeownership, hit hardest. Together the two fires killed 31 people, 12 in the Palisades Fire and 19 in the Eaton Fire.
For the wider basin, the danger was not only the flames but the smoke. Fires that burn homes, cars, and businesses release fine particle pollution along with whatever was inside those structures, and shifting winds carried that haze across large parts of the region for days. Wildfire smoke is the one thing that can push LA's air from a routine summer-ozone problem to genuinely hazardous in a matter of hours, which is why a live sensor reading near you matters more than a regional forecast when a fire is burning.
Ports, freeways, and everyday traffic
Even on days without fire, Los Angeles carries an unusual pollution load. The neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach form the busiest port complex in the nation, moving over 40 percent of the country's imported goods, and together they are the single largest air pollution source in the metro area. Off-road port equipment and the heavy-duty diesel trucks that haul containers contribute more than a tenth of the basin's fine-particle pollution and nearly a third of its smog-forming nitrogen oxides. Communities right beside the ports and the freeways that feed them carry the heaviest burden.
There has been real progress here too: diesel particulate pollution from the ports has fallen about 91 percent since 2005, even as cargo volumes grew. But if you live near the 710, the 5, or the port districts of San Pedro, Wilmington, or Long Beach, the pollution close to home can run well above what a citywide average suggests. That is the gap a neighborhood sensor closes, showing you the air on your block rather than the number for the region as a whole.
Los Angeles air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Los Angeles right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 2:51 PM PDT, the air quality in Los Angeles, California is AQI 6 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Los Angeles have the worst ozone pollution in the country?
Los Angeles sits in a shallow coastal basin ringed by mountains, with a temperature inversion that traps air over the city on average 260 days a year. Strong summer sunshine cooks exhaust from traffic and the ports into ground-level ozone, and the surrounding mountains keep it from blowing away. That combination has kept LA at the top of the American Lung Association's ozone rankings in 25 of the 26 years the report has existed, even though the air is far cleaner than it was decades ago.
Did the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires affect Los Angeles air quality?
Yes. Both fires broke out on January 7, 2025, and Santa Ana winds drove them into neighborhoods, the Palisades Fire through Pacific Palisades and the Eaton Fire into Altadena. Smoke from burning homes and vehicles carried fine particle pollution across large parts of the basin for days, and the two fires together killed 31 people. Wildfire smoke is the fastest way for LA's air to go from a routine summer-ozone problem to genuinely hazardous, which is why a live reading near you is more useful than a regional forecast when a fire is burning.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Los Angeles, 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 Los Angeles
We watch Los Angeles'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.