Air Quality in Madras, Oregon — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Madras — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 17 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Madras, Oregon is AQI 17 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 3.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 16 to 53. 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 Madras: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very 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 Madras and Culver, Metolius, Warm Springs, Terrebonne. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Madras
The sensors Canairy reads in Madras are 37 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| City center | 17 | Good |
| 8.3 mi SSW | 53 | Moderate |
| 8.8 mi SW | 29 | Good |
| 9.6 mi SW | 16 | Good |
Most days on the Madras plateau, the air is high-desert clear — that's the whole point of living at 2,240 feet with the Cascades on the horizon. But late summer can change that fast, and the smoke doesn't have to come from anywhere near town: fires on the forested slopes west of Warm Springs and grass fires in the dry country south of town have both put Madras under smoke in recent years.
What Canairy does for Madras
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Madras: 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 Madras or across the country, on one screen.
Madras sits between two kinds of fire country
To the west, beyond the farms, the land climbs through the Warm Springs Reservation into the forested Cascades — and that's where the Lionshead Fire started in August 2020. Within weeks it had spread across the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, closed 40 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, and put parts of Jefferson County under Level 1 and Level 2 evacuation notices while smoke drifted over the plateau.
To the south and east it's a different threat: dry grass and juniper that can burn fast. In July 2021 the Grandview Fire ignited on the Crooked River National Grassland southwest of Culver and grew to 4,000 acres in less than a day, forcing evacuations in Jefferson and Deschutes counties and prompting the governor to invoke the Emergency Conflagration Act.
September 2020, when the whole state's smoke arrived
During the September 2020 Labor Day fires, smoke from the Lionshead, Beachie Creek, and Riverside fires settled over Central Oregon, and Oregon DEQ's monitoring recorded unhealthy air in Madras and Redmond. Sisters, thirty miles south, logged seven days of outright hazardous air that year.
That's the lesson Madras keeps relearning: the fires that foul the air here are often on the far side of the Cascade crest, fifty or more miles away. The evacuation map says nothing about what you're breathing — only the monitors do.
Farm-town air on the high desert
Madras is the center of roughly 60,000 acres of irrigated farmland, and Jefferson County grows most of the world's hybrid carrot seed along with bluegrass seed, garlic seed, and mint. A working farm valley means dust in harvest season, and a dry high-desert summer means the surrounding grass and juniper are ready to burn by July.
A single citywide number also hides a lot out here. Madras, Culver, Metolius, and Warm Springs can be breathing noticeably different air at the same moment, which is why Canairy reads the PurpleAir sensors spread across the plateau instead of one distant station — the reading you see comes from sensors near the places you actually saved.
Madras air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Madras right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Madras, Oregon is AQI 17 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Madras get smoky in late summer?
August and September are Central Oregon's peak fire months. Smoke can come from forest fires west of the Cascade crest — like the Lionshead Fire in 2020, which burned for months on the Warm Springs Reservation — or from fast-moving grass fires close to town, like the 2021 Grandview Fire near Culver. When regional smoke settles over the high desert, it can linger for days.
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 Madras, 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 Madras
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