Air Quality in Medford, Oregon — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Medford — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 13 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Medford, Oregon is AQI 13 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.4 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 0 to 18. 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 Medford: 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 Medford and Ashland, Central Point, Talent, Phoenix. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Medford
The sensors Canairy reads in Medford agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 18-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.9 mi NNE | 18 | Good |
| 3.4 mi ENE | 18 | Good |
| 4.5 mi W | 0 | Good |
| 4.6 mi N | 9 | Good |
| 4.9 mi NNW | 13 | Good |
Medford sits in the Rogue Valley, a bowl ringed by mountains that gives Southern Oregon its mild seasons and also traps whatever ends up in the air. In recent years that has meant weeks of wildfire smoke most summers, and in September 2020 the Almeda Fire burned right up the valley through Talent and Phoenix, destroying roughly 2,600 homes and leaving the whole area under hazardous air. In winter the same valley walls hold wood smoke close to the ground on cold, still nights.
What Canairy does for Medford
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Medford: 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 Medford or across the country, on one screen.
The Almeda Fire and the summers of smoke
On September 8, 2020, a fire that started behind Almeda Drive in Ashland was pushed north by 40-plus mile-per-hour winds and drought-dry brush. Within hours it had torn through Talent and Phoenix and reached the edge of Medford, destroying about 2,600 homes and becoming the most destructive wildfire in Oregon's recorded history. More than 3,000 people were displaced, and the smoke that hung over the valley pushed air quality into the hazardous range.
The Almeda Fire was the sharpest example, but it was not an isolated one. In 2018, smoke from seven major fires, including the Klamathon Fire and the merged Taylor Creek and Klondike fires, kept Medford, Ashland and Grants Pass under unhealthy-to-hazardous air for nearly four weeks. Conditions got bad enough that Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality suggested small children and pregnant women consider leaving the area until the air improved. In the Rogue Valley, a smoky August has become something residents plan around.
Why the Rogue Valley holds onto smoke
Geography is the reason smoke lingers here longer than the fire itself. The Rogue Valley is a low basin surrounded by higher terrain, and it is prone to temperature inversions, where a layer of warm air settles over cooler air below and acts like a lid. When that happens, wildfire smoke and fine particles have nowhere to go and simply pool in the valley, sometimes for days after the flames are out.
That is why an AQI reading in Medford can swing so far from one part of the day to the next, and from one neighborhood to another. A morning inversion can trap smoke low and thick, then clear by afternoon when the air mixes. Checking the sensor nearest you, rather than a single citywide number, is the only way to know what you are actually breathing on your street.
Winter wood smoke, not just summer fire
Medford's air challenge is not only a fire-season problem. On cold, still winter nights, smoke from woodstoves and fireplaces settles into the same valley and builds up under the same inversions. Jackson County runs a Wood Burning Advisory from November through February for exactly this reason, forecasting each day as green, yellow, or red based on how much fine particle pollution the air is expected to hold.
On yellow and red days, the county asks residents to cut back or stop burning wood, because uncertified stoves and open fireplaces can push valley air toward unhealthy levels when it is stagnant. If you heat with wood or live near neighbors who do, winter particle pollution is worth watching as closely as summer smoke, and it shows up on the same sensors.
Medford air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Medford right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Medford, Oregon is AQI 13 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.4 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Medford's air get so smoky in late summer?
The Rogue Valley is a mountain-ringed basin prone to temperature inversions that trap smoke close to the ground, and wildfire season across Southern Oregon and Northern California runs from roughly late June into September. When fires like the 2020 Almeda Fire or the 2018 Klamathon and Taylor Creek fires are burning, smoke can pool in the valley for days and push air quality into the unhealthy or hazardous range. Canairy alerts you when the smoke rolls in, so you are not guessing from the color of the sky.
Does Medford have air quality problems in winter too?
Yes. On cold, still winter nights, wood smoke from stoves and fireplaces settles under the same valley inversions that trap summer wildfire smoke. Jackson County runs a Wood Burning Advisory from November through February, marking each day green, yellow, or red and asking residents to curtail burning on the worse days. Canairy tracks these winter particle spikes on the same sensors it uses in fire season.
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 Medford, 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 Medford
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