Air Quality in Oakland, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Oakland — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 45 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Oakland, California is AQI 45 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 8.1 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 36 to 51. 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 Oakland: 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 Oakland and Berkeley, Alameda, Emeryville, San Leandro. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Oakland
The sensors Canairy reads in Oakland are 15 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 0.8 mi NW | 37 | Good |
| 2.2 mi NW | 45 | Good |
| 2.6 mi NE | 36 | Good |
| 4.3 mi ENE | 51 | Moderate |
| 4.4 mi SSE | 47 | Good |
Most days in Oakland the air is genuinely good, scrubbed by the same Pacific breeze that pushes through the Golden Gate and across the bay. The trouble is uneven: late-summer and fall wildfire smoke can settle over the whole city for days at a time, and down in the West Oakland and East Oakland flatlands the diesel exhaust from the port and the 880 freeway is a year-round presence that never shows up in a regional average.
What Canairy does for Oakland
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Oakland: 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 Oakland or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Oakland is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 44 | Good | PM2.5 |
| Tomorrow | 53 | Moderate | PM2.5 |
| Monday | 55 | Moderate | PM2.5 |
| Tuesday | — | Moderate | PM2.5 |
| Wednesday | — | Moderate | PM2.5 |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Oakland 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.
Wildfire smoke doesn't have to start here to choke the city
Oakland's worst air rarely comes from fires inside the city. In November 2018 smoke from the Camp Fire, nearly 150 miles away in Butte County, pushed Oakland's AQI to 246 - the worst reading in the 20 years the Bay Area Air District had kept records. The bad air hung on from November 8 to the 20th, closing schools and forcing the Cal-Stanford Big Game to be postponed. Two years later, on September 9, 2020, smoke from the North Complex Fire and more than 20 other blazes turned the sky over the bay a deep orange at midday.
That 2020 season set a grim benchmark: 46 Spare the Air days, the most in two decades, and 25 days when fine-particle pollution blew past the national health standard. The one fire that did burn into Oakland itself, the 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire, showed how fast it can turn - driven by hot Diablo winds over October 19-23, it killed 25 people and destroyed more than 2,800 homes above the Caldecott Tunnel, with ash carried clear across the bay to Candlestick Park.
The port and the 880 corridor are the everyday story
Long before smoke season, West Oakland lives with air the rest of the region doesn't. The neighborhood is boxed in by the Port of Oakland, a rail yard, and three freeways - I-580, I-880, and I-980 - and the diesel trucks serving the port run past homes, schools, and childcare centers all day. Studies cited by the state found that people living within 10 miles of the truck-heavy I-880 have roughly twice the cancer risk and nearly twice the respiratory-illness risk of those the same distance from I-580, where trucks are banned. California formally designates West Oakland a disadvantaged community, disproportionately burdened by pollution.
Residents documented this themselves. The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, started in 2002 by Margaret Gordon and Brian Beveridge, trained neighbors in 2008 to carry air monitors in backpacks and measure pollution block by block. Their work showed air quality can vary up to eight times within a single block - the kind of difference a citywide number can never capture, and exactly why a sensor near your own street matters more than a regional headline.
Why the marine layer helps some blocks and traps others
Oakland's geography is a double-edged thing. Cool, dense air off the Pacific pours through the Golden Gate and across the bay, and on a normal day that sea breeze keeps the flatlands well ventilated. But when a layer of warmer air settles on top of that cool marine air, it forms an inversion - a lid that stops pollution from rising and disperses it sideways instead of up.
Under those conditions the flatlands from West Oakland through East Oakland can stay socked in while hillside neighborhoods like Montclair sit above the inversion in noticeably cleaner air. The same smoke event can read very differently a few hundred feet up the hill, which is why checking the sensor closest to your elevation and your block beats trusting a single number for the whole city.
Oakland air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Oakland right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Oakland, California is AQI 45 — Good — with PM2.5 at 8.1 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Is there smoke in Oakland right now?
The map on this page shows live PurpleAir readings across Oakland, updated continuously, so you can check current smoke levels sensor by sensor instead of guessing from a single citywide number. When Oakland does get smoky, it's rarely from a fire inside the city - the 2018 Camp Fire and the 2020 North Complex Fire both sent smoke from well over 100 miles away - and a Pacific inversion can trap that smoke over the flatlands for days while hillside neighborhoods like Montclair sometimes sit above it in cleaner air.
Why is the air in West Oakland worse than other parts of the city?
West Oakland sits inside a ring of heavy diesel sources - the Port of Oakland, a rail yard, and the I-580, I-880, and I-980 freeways - and port trucks run past homes and schools all day. State-cited studies found people living within 10 miles of the truck-heavy I-880 have roughly twice the cancer risk of those near I-580, where trucks are banned. Community monitoring has also shown air quality can vary up to eight times within a single block, so a sensor near your own street tells you far more than a citywide average.
When is wildfire smoke worst in Oakland?
Late summer and fall are the risk window. The smoke usually blows in from fires well outside the city - the 2018 Camp Fire pushed Oakland's AQI to 246, the worst on record, and September 2020 brought 46 Spare the Air days, the most in two decades. On bad days a Pacific inversion can trap that smoke over the flatlands for a week or more, while hillside neighborhoods sometimes sit above it in cleaner air.
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 Oakland, 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 Oakland
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