Air Quality in Olympia, Washington — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Olympia — with free alerts the moment the air turns.

Live Olympia AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Olympia and Lacey, Tumwater, Yelm, Shelton.

Olympia sits at the very bottom of Puget Sound, on Budd Inlet where the Deschutes River comes in, and it gets colder and stiller than places an hour up the road. The city averages about 157 frost-free growing days a year, nearly a hundred fewer than Seattle. Those cold, calm nights are the whole story of Olympia's air. The Olympic Region Clean Air Agency ran a year of monitoring here between October 2015 and January 2017 and found the same shape every winter day: fine particles climb in the evening, stay high overnight and through the early morning, then fall away by lunchtime. Wood smoke accounts for 50 to 65 percent of the evening and nighttime particles in winter, and only about 20 percent between noon and 4 PM.

Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.

A different agency watches Olympia's air than Seattle's

The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency covers King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish counties, and it stops before it gets here. Thurston County is regulated by the Olympic Region Clean Air Agency, which covers Clallam, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, Mason, Pacific and Thurston counties and has its head office on Limited Lane NW in west Olympia. That means burn bans, monitoring and stove programs in Olympia are announced separately from the Seattle-area ones, and the rules are not identical.

ORCAA's burn ban stages are written around outdoor fires. Under a Stage 1 ban no outdoor burning is allowed anywhere in the region, including recreational fires, even in areas where outdoor burning is normally permitted. Stage 2 bans outdoor fires of any kind, backyard fire kettles, chimineas and fire pits included. The stove side is different too: ORCAA pays Thurston County residents who burn at least a cord of wood a year $750 to switch an old stove to natural gas or propane, $1,000 to switch to electric or a pellet stove, and $2,200 toward an electric heat pump, or $500 simply to recycle an old stove and not replace it.

East Olympia and west Olympia do not read the same

The saturation study put four monitors around the county at once: one at Mountain View Elementary in Lacey, which has been the permanent Thurston County monitoring site since 1985; one at Olympia Fire Station 3 on Boulevard Road SE in east Olympia, in a residential neighborhood; one at the ORCAA offices in west Olympia, surrounded by apartments and offices; and one at Rochester Middle School in the rural south of the county. Air quality was good more than 90 percent of the time at all four. But the differences between them were large enough to matter.

In winter, roughly 10 to 15 percent of days reached Moderate or Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups at Lacey, east Olympia and Rochester. At the west Olympia site fewer than 2 percent of winter days were even Moderate and none reached Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups; it was good more than 99 percent of the year. The agency's explanation is simple and very local: the east Olympia and Lacey monitors sit in single-family neighborhoods full of wood stoves and fireplaces, and the west Olympia one sits in a commercial and apartment district where hardly anyone burns wood. Strong temperature inversions often set in after dark and hold through morning, which is what turns an ordinary evening of wood burning into a Moderate reading. By midday the inversion weakens or lifts and winter air is about as clean as an average summer day.

The burn permits that stop at the city line

Thurston County issues about three thousand outdoor burn permits a year, and not one of them is valid inside the Olympia, Lacey or Tumwater city limits or urban growth area. That line shows up in the data. The rural Rochester monitor recorded 11 Moderate days and 3 Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups days during a stretch when the Lacey reference monitor read Good, and the wind direction at Rochester pointed the higher readings back toward farmland to the west and southwest rather than toward the houses. ORCAA's read is that outdoor burning, not wood stoves, drives the peaks out there.

Inside the cities the source flips. With open burning banned, ORCAA found that stoves and fireplaces in Olympia and Lacey produce about the same particle concentrations as open burning does in the rural communities. It has been that way for a long time. In August 1987 the Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater area was declared a Group 1 non-attainment area for PM10 after repeated exceedances of the daily federal standard, and it was new wood stove and outdoor burning rules that brought it back into compliance. Thurston County's population has grown by roughly a third since the mid-1990s and the air has still improved.

Olympia air quality FAQ

Why is there smoke in Olympia today?

From late fall through winter it is almost always residential wood burning. ORCAA's monitoring found residential wood heating is the dominant source of fine particles in Thurston County during the cold months, peaking in the evening and overnight when people are home with the stove going and a temperature inversion is holding the smoke near the ground. In July, August and September it is more likely to be wildfire smoke carried in from British Columbia, eastern Washington, Oregon or California. Wildfires within ORCAA's own counties are rare, remote and small, so smoke here is usually something that arrived rather than something burning nearby.

What is the air quality in Olympia right now?

The map on this page reads PM2.5 live from PurpleAir sensors around Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater, which is more useful here than a single county number given how differently the east and west sides of town behave in winter. Coverage across the Olympia area is reasonable rather than dense, so on a still winter evening the nearest sensor to you is worth more than the average. Canairy turns whatever it is reading into a plain-English verdict and can alert you when it crosses a level you set.

Is Olympia's air actually bad in winter?

Not usually, and it is much better than it was. Across a full year of monitoring at four sites, air quality in Thurston County was good more than 90 percent of the time. The problem is concentrated: it is the evening and overnight hours between roughly November and February, on the cold, still nights when an inversion sets in. Winter midday air is about as clean as an average summer day. That narrow window is exactly what an alert is good for, because it comes and goes within a few hours.

What makes Olympia's air worse in summer?

Not much, most years. Across the saturation study, summertime PM2.5 stayed below 7.5 micrograms per cubic meter at all four Thurston County sites more than 98 percent of the time, with no meaningful daily pattern. What summer pollution there is comes from a mix of exhaust off Interstate 5, local industry and wind-blown dust. The exception is transported wildfire smoke in July, August and September, which ORCAA says has worsened summer air in the region since the study finished.

What AQI level is unhealthy?

Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0–50 is Good and 51–100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions — and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.

Is Canairy free?

Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.