Air Quality in Minot, North Dakota — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Minot — with free alerts the moment smoke drifts down from the north.
AQI 21 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Minot, North Dakota is AQI 21 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 3.8 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. 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 Minot: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a 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 Minot and Burlington, Surrey, Berthold, Velva. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Most of the year, Minot's air is about as quiet as it gets in an American city — a small prairie town on the Drift Prairie with little heavy industry, ringed by farmland in every direction. Then, on May 17-18, 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in western Canada rolled south and Ward County recorded a full 24 hours of "purple," hazardous-category air quality — something North Dakota's Department of Environmental Quality called the worst air the state had ever measured.
What Canairy does for Minot
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Minot: 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 Minot or across the country, on one screen.
Minot's worst air quality on record came from Canada, not North Dakota
Fires broke out across western Canada in mid-May 2023, and by the morning of May 17 the smoke had reached Minot: downtown thickened and dimmed under haze, a rooftop photo from the Magic City Discovery Center showed the skyline barely visible, and local track meets and golf practice were called off. By that afternoon Trinity Health's emergency room had treated at least one patient for smoke-related symptoms. Ward County's air quality index crossed into the hazardous "purple" category for a full day — the first time that had happened here — while the Scandinavian Heritage Park still went ahead with its Norwegian Constitution Day gathering under a smoke-hazed sky.
That single event turned out to be the opening act for what North Dakota's papers later called "the summer of smoke." By September, EPA data showed seven North Dakota counties, Ward among them, had joined 19 counties across 11 states in recording a full 24 hours of purple-level air, something ND DEQ's air monitoring manager Ryan Mills said the state had never seen before. Canadian wildfires that year eventually burned more than 380,000 acres and sent smoke as far as Western Europe — a reminder that Minot's air can turn on a fire hundreds of miles north, with no local warning beyond a hazy sky.
Minot sits in a river valley, not on the open prairie
Unlike the flat tableland that surrounds it, Minot itself sits down in the valley of the Souris River — known locally as the Mouse River — roughly 160 feet below the Drift Prairie above. Downtown Minot sits around 1,549 feet in elevation while the airport on the plain above is near 1,716 feet, a real drop carved by the river over thousands of years. Valleys like this are exactly the kind of terrain that lets cold, dense air pool overnight rather than mix out, especially on the still, subzero nights Minot is known for.
That geography does not create Minot's air problems on its own, but it does mean the city is a natural collecting point for whatever is already in the air above it, whether that is a winter cold-air pool or a low-lying smoke plume drifting down from the north. It is also part of why a single official reading miles away tells you less than a sensor near the actual valley floor where most of Minot lives.
There's no permanent government monitor watching Minot's air
Ward County has historically gone without a regulatory air-quality monitor of its own — AirNow's federal network shows no current-conditions station in Minot, and the American Lung Association's State of the Air report notes that North Dakota's monitoring network is thin enough that many counties, Ward included, get no annual grade at all for ozone or particle pollution. Most years, that gap doesn't matter much: Ryan Mills of ND DEQ has pointed out that North Dakota normally has some of the cleanest air of any state once you set aside a smoke event.
But it does mean that on an ordinary day, or even a bad one, there has traditionally been no easy way for someone in Minot to check the air where they actually live. Ward County is also, per the Census Bureau, a rural, agricultural county with fewer than 35 people per square mile — plenty of farmland and open sky, but not the kind of place regulators have historically prioritized for monitoring. PurpleAir sensors fill exactly that gap, giving Minot a live picture of its own air instead of a distant reading or none at all.
Minot air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Minot right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:07 AM CDT, the air quality in Minot, North Dakota is AQI 21 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.8 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did Minot's air quality get so bad in 2023?
On May 17-18, 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in western Canada drifted south over North Dakota, and Ward County recorded a full 24 hours of hazardous "purple" air quality for the first time on record. By September, seven North Dakota counties had joined 19 counties across 11 states in hitting that same hazardous level at some point that summer, in what North Dakota's Department of Environmental Quality called the worst air quality the state had ever measured.
Does Minot have its own official air quality monitor?
Not really. AirNow's federal monitoring network doesn't list a current-conditions station in Minot, and the American Lung Association's State of the Air report notes that North Dakota's monitoring network is thin enough that many counties, including Ward, receive no annual grade for ozone or particle pollution. That's part of why a live sensor network like PurpleAir matters here.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Minot, 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 Minot
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